Todd Kwiczak

Wildlife, Nature, and Landscape Photographer

est 2020

I am a hobby Alberta wildlife photographer residing in Calgary. I am very passionate about travel, animals, wild places, and the need to conserve them. Photography is my means to share the wonderful moments I get to spend with wild animals in their natural habitat and incredible landscapes with others. My mission is to tap into people’s emotions towards animals, inspire them to learn more about them and take action to conserve wildlife and its habitats.

The idea behind “Mountain Bear series” was to celebrate the wildlife awareness of bears and bring light to these amazing animals in a good way and to enjoy in your home knowing they were captured in the true meaning of leave no trace. I’m a professional photographer and interested in both wildlife and weddings by creating images that celebrate light, connection and story since 2007. While we have a vast amount of wildlife and travel photos from the last 15+ years. These are not actual photos. Instead I’ve used computer software to create the scenes, the animal's, lighting, mood. I give specific direction using words only to a program, lenses, angles, camera choice, color theme, colors, styling, backgrounds, attitude and overall look and the artificial intelligence goes to work, it sends back suggestions and more often than not it’s completely wrong, so I try other ways to describe what I’m after, change wording, move phrases around and try to get the AI to understand the mood. Artist Jonas Peterson says this well. It’s frustrating mostly, the AI is still learning, but getting any collaborator to understand you can be difficult no matter if it’s a human or a machine. After a long stretch of trial and error I get closer to a style and look I want and after that it comes down to curation, picking the renders I believe go well together, I start making it a series. To me the process is similar to that of a film director’s, I direct the AI the same way they would talk to an actor or set designer, it’s a process, we try over and over again until we get it right. Should I get all the credit? God, no, the AI creates with my help and direction, it’s a collaboration between a real brain and an artificial one. But it’s also just the first step, I use a number of other applications to finesse the first crude results I’m getting that takes up to 4 hours of work to get it exactly the way I envisioned it to be. I hope you enjoy this series as much as I did creating it and thank you for your support.