Worth a thousand words?

You have no doubt heard that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. Often times it is, but in the age of the camera enabled mobile phone, pictures are no longer the rarity they once were. It used to be that cameras captured pictures onto film, and that film had to get processed to put the picture in your hands. That was then. This is now, and this issue is dedicated to the new art of generating pictures rather than taking them. The opportunities are only limited by your imagination (what would you put in the gold studio above?) Let’s dive in…

The past 18 months has seen the world of…image creation is a better phrase than photography… flip on its head again. We now have the magic that is an image created by text. Who’d have thought it! The thing is, it is now so good, across so many formats, that it is almost impossible to tell from the ‘real’ thing.

All the images below were created by means of a text prompt over the last few months in all different styles. I hope you get some inspiration from them.

First of all, it doesn’t have to be a photograph that is created. Before photos, there were paintings. A simple prompt such as “paint a bunch of tulips in the style of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers” will yield a result like this:

Whilst this will never replace the wonder reserved for seeing a Van Gogh in the flesh, as a photo of the art goes, this works for me. If however, your tastes are a bit more modern and say anime is your thing, then a simple instruction like “doctor seeing woman patient in anime style” will get you something like this:

The doctors desk is a bit narrow resulting in doctor and patient being too close, but otherwise, a perfect anime scene. If contemporary portait art is your thing, then here is one of “Kylian Mbappe, football superstar, looking pretty cool in a Real Madrid hoodie, contemporary portrait art style.”

Really cool, don’t you think? He’ll probably be playing there next season, so I’m sure we’ll get used to seeing this.

Let’s say however that you ply your trade as a photographer doing food shots for magazines. All that styling, getting the food just right, the lighting perfect, the background perfect all to create that mouthwatering shot of a sushi stack worthy of a magazine cover. Then some kid comes along an does this in less than 30 seconds:

It’s not fair really, is it? But what about fashion photography. Here’s a shot for a linen shirt advert:

Now, it’s not really an advert, but it could be. This again, is not real. It is 100% generated by text. The person does not exist. But the photo does and can be used any way you want.

One final image that I want to share. I remember that years ago I was reading a National Geographic article about life in a North African souk. The photographer was relating how he had waited for some time to get the lighting right and the idea was to capture the hustle and bustle of the souk. The photograph was black and white and properly captured the vibrancy of the market, but it also had a young girl staring at the camera as though she had never seen one before. Movement and stillness in one photograph. All that preamble was just to say that I tried to recreate that same image and here is the result:

The world of image creation is now limited only by your ability to capture with words what you want the image to be. The more you can tell AI in clear terms the image you want, the more likely you are to get it.

These photgraphs were created using either MidJourney or ChatGPT Plus. Both are available for a small monthly subscription, although you can access the same model that ChatGPT uses for free by using the Bing search engine. I would urge you to play with these tools and let your creative juices flow!