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Are you ready? Photography is about to change forever


If you are a photographer who makes a living taking pictures of people, you need to be prepared for this.

I will be the first to admit that as a landscape photographer I don’t pretend to know much about the art of photographing people. However, I do know that most of the money in photography comes from photographing people. Weddings, portraits, headshots, family photos, fashion, sports: you name it and it can involve everyone.

Unless you haven’t been following any news, you’ve probably caught the recent wave of AI-generated images from platforms like Dall-E-2where you can enter search terms and get a lot of different results, sometimes with scary realism, or funny mishaps. Even in its infancy, it produced works of art good enough to win a contest or two. Average results are very good or miss, but really interesting to see what it can produce.

What happens when you embrace that power and give a little more direction, specifically in the photography industry?

The End of Professional Photography

Lee Morris covered this topic a few months ago, presented examples of non-existent people, created in seconds, with extremely detailed results. I covered this in my video above, but let’s go a step further to mention what happens when you enter yourself as a subject? I recently found a service that does exactly that, so obviously I gave it a try.

The service I came across was avatarai.me, is currently costing money. I fully expect these services to start becoming more popular very quickly. They ask you to submit 20 pictures of yourself: 10 close-ups of your face, 5 pictures of breasts or more, and 5 full-body pictures. Within a few hours, you will be sent back a theme-dependent set of images based on their services at the time. For example, Christmas is the current theme created by this service, more themes will be added later.

Here are a few pictures I got back. This is me, but they are not me. Some of these are terrifyingly good, all giving no direction to the system that created them. When you start thinking about the possibilities with just a little direction, you really start to realize how much this will change photography.

Headshots, holiday photos and stock photos

Let’s start small while remaining realistic. I don’t expect any photographer reading this to only earn income from top or vacation shots, but I imagine many will help subsidize studio expenses and residual income with studio sessions. of different types.

It just so happened when the service I used provided a few examples of professional head shots. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. Can I use them professionally? Not yet. But imagine a web service that just generates professional headshots where you can set a few parameters like keep your face structure and eye color set to “realistic” and then get over 100 your photos in a professional setting. You don’t have to get dressed, work with a photographer, or even leave the house.

This is possible right away. This is not something for the next few years. Give the AI ​​service a little more computing power, a little more time, and direct it to do something, like a professional headshot, and this will absolutely be a service that people start using. use. This will absolutely have an effect on photographers who are working right now.

The service also sent back a few holiday-style photos that are far from perfect. But continuing the sentiment above to use a service that has more direction and more power, I suspect the results will continue to be better. We’re not quite at the point where you can serve up AI images of four family members and get holiday postcards back, but I don’t think we’re that far away. You don’t have to swaddle the kids, your partner, buy the outfit, or worry about a bunch of personal factors.

Think about services like Shutterstock and Getty, who provide a multitude of shared stock images for different purposes. Why keep paying photographers for more images or people when they can just use their own library to start creating their own? This can happen now and directly affects photographers who earn income from people’s stock of photos.

Future

Take it a step further and think about where this is headed. Lee covered this quite well in his post, showing the possibility of creating mannequins in portrait or editorial settings. This is coming. Imagine you are a big clothing brand and instead of paying a photographer, makeup artist, model, etc. to create the image of a new fashion line. You just need to provide service images of new products and let it start working to create realistic images that you can use without worrying about copyright, usage rights or even is something controversial, such as the model in the photo may be subject to negative press (think Kanye).

I doubt that a company will start or have started to develop this service and will work with major fashion brands in the future and completely change the industry. Think about the benefits for companies of not having to worry about the many factors involved in creating editorial images for advertising campaigns as I outlined above. Things like this are already happening in the industry on a smaller scale. When you visit an online store for a clothing brand, you may find faceless images and interchangeable clothing on stock model images.

If you are a wedding photographer and feel safe, I personally think even that market may suffer in the future. Imagine 10 years from now, you’re at a wedding and instructed to take as many pictures on your iPhone 24 or Pixel 17 as you want. People then send all the pictures from the wedding into a folder, distribute it to some sort of wedding AI generator, and create beautiful, timely wedding photos without hiring a wedding photographer.

What a time to be alive. I am not saying the sky is falling, nor am I claiming that this is the end of professional photography. I think it will start to impact monetization in the industry. It won’t make photography an obsolete profession, but it will put pressure on the industry to adapt and change. I think it will totally impact people who want to make a living in the future of portrait photography. do you agree? What are your thoughts on these services? Do you think it won’t change anything or will it revolutionize the future?

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