AI and Photography – some thoughts

Every­one is cur­rent­ly talk­ing about AI and its uses and if it should be allowed or not. I assume that AI will gain impor­tance in our dai­ly lives and as pho­tog­ra­phers, and we should get a good under­stand­ing of the capa­bil­i­ties and limitations.

We already have some pret­ty amaz­ing tech at our fin­ger­tips, but the new wave of tools like ChatGPT/Dall‑E or Mid­jour­ney open new pos­si­bil­i­ties espe­cial­ly in the post-pro­cess­ing part of dig­i­tal photography.

The top­ic is quite tech­ni­cal, and this web­site is sup­posed to be for all kind of pho­tog­ra­phers, so I will keep it at a usable lev­el, con­cen­trat­ing on how to use it rather than if you should use it or how it works under the hood.

I will also pick more or less ran­dom sub-top­ics that I come across, to pass it on to you.

Midjourney 5

Mid­jour­ney is on the hori­zon for a lit­tle bit longer, but is inter­est­ing for pho­tog­ra­phers as its out­put is images, rather than text. I used up my free gen­er­a­tion points and would have to pay a month­ly fee for it from now on, but haven’t done so yet. I just don’t use it often enough, only played around with it a bit.

But I came across this resource (web­site) here, and I find it a good col­lec­tion of use cas­es for using Mid­jour­ney in your pho­tog­ra­phy: Mid­jour­ney for Pho­tog­ra­phers | Guide | Andrei Kovalev’s Midguide (midlibrary.io)

Basis for all of that is that you have an idea about what you want to do and let Mid­jour­ney give you pre-visu­al­iza­tion of how it could look like with dif­fer­ent styles, Cam­era gear, loca­tions, com­po­si­tion etc., all with­out tak­ing an image. You can then con­cen­trate on the results you like best and use the real stuff more tar­get­ed, hav­ing test­ed your ideas before the shoot. 

There is also an inter­est­ing web­site with a table of dif­fer­ent pho­to­graph­ic styles: 

Copy of Mid­jour­ney v5 Pho­tog­ra­phers Ref­er­ence Sheet – Google Sheets

If you after a spe­cif­ic style of por­trait or street pho­tog­ra­phy, have a look at the ref­er­ence sheet and study the pho­tog­ra­phers that are list­ed there. Looks like this:

As great as the gen­er­at­ed images look, I found Mid­jour­ney a bit cum­ber­some to use. I am sure it will evolve over time and eas­i­er to use tools will be put on top of the engine, to make it usable by every­one, and not only the geeki­est of prompt engi­neers. At the moment, peo­ple need some spe­cial­ized knowledge/training to use the tools prop­er­ly to get a good result. But if you like com­mand prompts and Dis­cord and tin­ker­ing around with the cor­rect prompts for the sys­tem, it can be quite rewarding.

That’s it for today, but as this will be a series of arti­cles: see you soon! A bit of a cliff-hang­er: I’m cur­rent­ly review­ing free mid­jour­ney alter­na­tives, here is a Google search prompt for this:
mid­jour­ney free alter­na­tives 2024 – Google Search

Have fun tak­ing images, with phys­i­cal gear and your phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment! And use your cre­ativ­i­ty (and AI) to cre­ate amaz­ing results.