Roughly 5 billion photos are taken every day, and anyone with a Midjourney account can now produce an image that looks interesting in seconds. With volume that high and a barrier that low, it becomes a practical question whether your own pictures carry anything that someone else's don't.
Max Kent starts with AI image generation. Kent says most of his own enjoyment of photography sits in the process of making a picture, while prompt-based images are almost entirely about the outcome. He calls having an idea the bare minimum for any creative person. The hard part is having the skill, life experience, and vision to get that idea out of your head and into a frame. He also points out how often prompters copy one another, stacking imitation on imitation built from work that real photographers made first. His label for the prompter is "curator," someone assembling a look from images pulled off Pinterest or Instagram.
From there, Kent turns to identity, and he's careful not to make it a requirement. He contrasts the feed of nice towers and nice streets with flipping through a photo book by someone you admire. The feed pictures rarely stay with you. In the book, every frame feels like it belongs to one person. He also pushes back on the idea that you only become a photographer once you go professional or sell work, pointing to photographers whose bodies of work went unseen for decades before anyone recognized them. A few years ago, Kent felt lost with photography. He went through long stretches of barely shooting and feeling bad about it. He found his way back by studying the photographers who inspired him alongside his own archive, then writing down a handful of words to guide him. The effect he describes is specific. He stopped taking the dutiful picture of whatever landmark sat in front of him when he arrived somewhere new.
Camera makers have spent the last few years working on a related problem from the hardware side. The Leica M11-P arrived in 2023 as the first camera with Content Credentials built in. Content Credentials is a standard backed by Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative that records where an image came from and how it was edited. Sony has since brought similar authenticity features to several of its bodies. That work can show a real camera captured a file. It can't show whether the person holding it had something to say, and that question sits entirely with you. Kent's method is one you can try this week. Look through the photos you keep returning to, yours and other people's, and pick three or four words that describe what they share. Write them down and carry them on your next outing. If your words are "quiet" and "texture," a famous landmark becomes a reason to study the worn stone up close or walk the empty side street next to it. The list does its job when it makes you skip a picture you would have taken on autopilot.
Kent also separates casual shooting from the committed kind through intention. By intention, he means leaving the house planning to photograph something, whether that's a city, street life, or wherever you happen to be. Shooting that way makes you notice more. You see small moments, other ways to compose the same scene, and what you actually want the image to say. He ties intention back to identity and argues that your temperament leaks into your frames. Nervous or confident, introverted or outgoing, you'll avoid certain things and run toward others, and the pictures record those choices. He then takes on the worry that every subject has already been photographed thousands of times. He uses a celebrated street photographer's snowy city scenes as proof that a familiar subject can still feel like a memory when the right person frames it.
Kent's full argument is in the video above.
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3 Comments
BROVO!!!!!!! My way and only MY WAY is just the fact it all is just experimentation with a tool that is a camera some thing that captures light where every image is just playing with setting first to see if and it could be done the way my mind thought is what it would come out to be. But every image is unique and no one else could possibly get the same without being there at the same time.
Have you ever seen a crowd following a photographer on a tour most sign up for the tours to many different places. Example I used to watch Trey Ratcliff tours with huge crowds taking image of places and things and no two getting the same results mainly because Trey used PS and edited different parts and with all combined looked like nothing of the place to start with. Just saying the capture is just the start then comes the editing. Panting is like it also just the painter chooses what it should look like.
Any body can go to the same places as images seen somewhere and capture the same sort of but with million others of the same place. The key difference between others is that what you see when out there where ever you see something that no one else will ever see and your experimentation see's a end result sometimes but that end is also developing even after.
Let me ask you back in 2013-15 if you did not know about the MW in the night sky but saw it in an image would you of tried, I had the camera for another reason. The A7SM1 then M2 where in all the magazines images but all were in very dark places and on line only PhotoPills told how. So one June night I went out to a local beach where it bright but I could not see the MW so I just used a 30s exposure with F4 lens and then saw what my eyes could not see like some with a microscope. What I had done is capture something in place to this day no other has tried. When I am out at night no one else is around for all are spending 4 hours watching the boob tube or sleeping missing the best shows of nature.
Before all that I was experimenting Bracketing with my Canon T2i with the Promote Control getting sharp and in focus moons with bright wide foregrounds
The point is every image is an experiment with your tool where some say only using Manual Mode is the real photographer but you pay for all the modes including Auto mode just saying there is more to use in that $3k+ tool as well all thing needed.
When out and about just look and see really see and not just do snap captures.
With my MW captures I learned there is a season from Feb early mornings with the face of what looks like face of someone watching over us and bring light to the darkest nights to Oct early evenings with a vertical trail of stars to the heavens far above with Pegasus flying high over something (you choose). The darkest skies are over the coastal east and gulf coasts with more foregrounds that out west in so called dark skies so you can go anywhere to do that one capture that no other is or has captured.
1. Using T2i and promote control
2. at Cedar Key under amber street lights even
3. a Feb MW on Jekyll Inland Ga behind the Holiday Inn
4. first MW capture using PhotoPills app to find and point and side story I went out to scout a location then that night is was so dark I could not find the Life Guard Stand so just used the camera to find it. For added info playing with ocean tides the Planit Pro app has a tide section that is like a sinewave along with the moon and sun sine waves that shows high and low tides and all in between with hour or minute by minute. Another if bad weather on the new moon night you have 5 days before and after with a waning crescent moon before you will get what looks like a full moon below the MW, ever see that by anyone!
American President Kennedy had a vision for landing a man on the moon (and safely returning him to earth), and expressed his intention before Congress in 1961. It was the scientists, mathematicians and engineers though who executed that plan and made it happen in 1969. The parallel with photography is that vision and intention are only the first steps in photography.
When Max claims that "it's not about the technical stuff," that's not entirely true. Excellence in photography is indeed about the mastery of technical stuff. It's about understanding the camera's controls in order to create the intended exposure, or desired depth-of-field, or motion. It's understanding how light shapes and impacts an image. It's understanding how composition creates depth. It's understanding how secondary and background elements relate to the main subject. Producing excellent photographs demands exceptional post-processing skills, whether based in the film darkroom or digital darkroom, the principle is the same. What hits the film or sensor is just the first step. Believing otherwise appeals to those novices who want the camera to do everything without investing in the hard work necessary to learn advanced photography skills. And it takes years of experience. There are no shortcuts.
Simply walking a block away from the main attraction that is photographed and beaten to death on social media by a gazillion other photographers, in order to snap a picture of something in a back alley that's different, merely trades one snapshot for another. Don't be fooled into thinking that photography is just about emotions and feelings, or getting away from the tour bus, or how the image fares in social media. A great photograph for well over a hundred years has always been the same.
Airshow, October 3, 2026. Vision, intention, and a lot of technical stuff....
Just to add what it takes to be a photographer. You HAVE TO BE OUT THERE! The person is a woman April 12, 2021 2:30 AM a very cold morning at Jekyll Island Ga. Driftwood Beach. The woman had an Electric powered chair with tank treads and drove there by herself towing in an enclosed trailer and with crutches setup tripod and camera and so dark I never saw her until I was done and checking for all things accounted for. Also had no idea how she got through all the driftwood, she came across behind me on the top of the dunes and found her in my Panorama in post.