The writing is on the wall for the 85mm F/1.2. It used to communicate prestige, the crown jewel in the elite photographer’s arsenal. A shot with a background nuked to high heaven may have been perceived as high end. If you hired someone for your wedding and you’re tack sharp in a sea of green and blue, in a world of your own with your lover, you might feel like you got an incredible shot.

But I think we may have misheard the great photographers and mistaken the creative choices in a few great photos for a communication of competence and professional-ness.

If you were the photographer thinking through the decision of how to render your background in the context of the image you want to create, AI is no threat to you. The threat it poses is more towards Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Zeiss who make a killing selling you F1.2 for $1.2k more than a perfectly suitable lens within your budget.

It’s true that going out and buying a sick lens and a top of the line camera, and shooting the world in glorious Toneh may not land you gigs anymore, if it ever did in the first place.

The transition we are seeing is towards a new standard for conveying competence and professionalism in images, away from the results we get from Rembrandt lighting and shallow depth of field. Who wanted to be sitting shooting graduation photos all day anyways? Now we can finally start to value the weird, edgy, lofi aesthetics which have always dominated the world of memes — the modern era’s true preeminent art form.

So yeah, if you specialized in generic glam photos, I guess stop if the clients stop showing up. If you want to create art, nothing happened, and if you want inspiration in our newfound AI hellscape, maybe make some memes I guess. I don’t know maybe I’ll be replaced next week too.

💡 OK let’s stop being reductive. Yeah the meta has changed from slick pro to grungey authentic. Great. Long live the smartphone, the $3 ewaste camera, and the polaroid. I don’t think it’s so much about “let’s make what AI won’t” but it’s about “the pro look doesn’t convey prestige anymore so my $5k lens is always at f/8 and I am sad”