In Troyes, AI helps firefighters with their 2025 calendar

A green background with firefighters posing and a sketch of the expected final result right in front of you. This is how Trojan photographer Olivier Gobert, founder of Studio OG, worked for two days last summer. Already behind the lens of the photos of 2024 calendar of the Troyes Firefighters Associationsold several thousand copies, this time he used AI. In the 2025 calendar, currently offered door-to-door by firefighters and available to order, we discover everyday heroes battling a dragon, rescuing a boat adrift in a bathtub or attempting to coax an uncooperative unicorn.

“The idea was to integrate firefighters into the world of toys,” says Olivier Gobert. These decorations would have been difficult to achieve in real life. » For the 2024 calendar, the forty-year-old had sometimes cheated with the proportions, likea batmobile bought in a toy store. A year later, don’t believe that the photographer’s mission has been simplified thanks to artificial intelligence. Quite the contrary! “The work was not more complicated but the pre-production and post-production phases took more time,” he explains.

Beforehand, it was necessary to imagine the settings into which he wanted to immerse the Trojan firefighters. And formulate requests as precisely as possible. “If two people want to create the same setting, the two results can be very different,” he warns. A polite way of saying that AI doesn’t do everything and that the individual at the keyboard is important. “We cannot ignore AI. She is there and there. It’s an additional means and for this calendar, it allowed us to create settings that would not have been possible in real life. »

A revolution as important as the end of film

His reference images created, based on the different professions that the Troyes firefighters wanted to highlight, Olivier Gobert took the photos in one of the two barracks in the Troyes metropolitan area. With its green background, it was far from the real settings in different locations of the Dawn which were necessary for the opus 2024. Then, the perfectionist worked on his images to the extreme to make them as real as possible, in particular the orientation of light and shadows. AI is evolving so quickly that it has pushed the vice, for fun, to take back the images published in the 2025 calendar in a second time, to take into account the latest developments in its software. The difference is noticeable.

A fan of new technologies, Olivier Gobert sees in the arrival of AI the same revolution that took place when film photography, little by little, gave way to digital: “We cannot pretend that this is not the case. didn’t exist. It’s impossible to deny new technologies in an activity like mine. » Even with AI assistance, those familiar with his work will find the Studio OG style in this 2025 Trojan Firefighters calendar. “The vast majority of photos produced by AI could not be produced in reality. It remains a tool but if we don’t have ideas…” The Trojan firefighters would never have succeeded in controlling a dragon with their water hoses.