Amazon’s recently announced Titan generative AI isn’t quite the same as consumer-facing image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney, but the Titan Image Generator may hold implications for professional photographers working with corporate clients.

Businesses that use it can take images of their own products and have the generative AI swap out settings, backgrounds, or complementary visual elements through prompts. It can also produce entirely original images.

For its part, Amazon says photographers have nothing to fear, and that the Titan Image Generator will supplement rather than replace the original content photographers and creative digital artists produce for their clients.

“The [Titan Image Generator] would really be meant to augment what photographers are always doing because, and based on my observations and what I’ve seen at the enterprise level, is most people want new and original content, especially when they’re looking at photographing new events or new people. They’re going to still want photographers,” says Sherry Marcus, Director of Applied Science in the Generative AI Services Organization at AWS in an exclusive interview with PetaPixel.

That may also depend on the kind of photography brands or corporations are looking for. Marcus sees content creation within advertising as the biggest use case right now, where industries with the “largest appetite” for ads would be interested in how Titan’s multimodal AI works to create images supplementing their own assets. A brand trying to figure out where to place images can adapt said images based on, for instance, what’s on the website, what user preferences are, as well as regional or seasonal imperatives.

Teaching the AI the Ropes

Being a multimodal generative AI platform, Amazon is teaching its Titan Image Generator with a lot of data from both images and text to learn and spot similar images and be more precise in delivering results. The “secret sauce” is in trying to predict what the next words or images should be in the model, which is a key element in how the AI is being trained. Humans supervise the fine-tuning, which is basically sets of questions and answers. So, for example, if the request is a picture of a penguin on a surfboard in Hawaii, variations should appear that are very specific to the request.

“When you search for something in natural language, we encode the content both in text and in the image, which is very powerful in getting the right answer and generating all of those components,” she says. “In the prompt, you can get it more specific and say, ‘The sun shines from X angle,’ or ‘Give me a picture at dusk or 5 pm.’ It’ll look at the text and know that dusk and 5 pm may be the same things and then look at images associated with that.”

For advertisers, that kind of granularity without setting up multiple photo shoots could be a cost-effective way to adapt a campaign for different markets. That is, at least in part, because brands can use the multimodal image generator with their own assets, like blending in an existing product photo with a unique background, scene, character, or visual complement that wouldn’t always necessitate setting up a separate shoot to get similar results.

Marcus also notes there are safeguards in place to deal with copyright infringement and inappropriate content that will include invisible watermarks. These will confirm images were generated by AI, while the image generator will try to create different images whenever two users use the same exact prompt.

“In that sense, you still might need someone to take the photos but you just don’t need to necessarily put them on location,” she says.

“Brands want authenticity but they also really want to be able to do things quickly. I think generative AI is providing that capability to do the touch-ups much more quickly but I don’t see brands really wanting to get rid of that authenticity, that realism, that spirit of the moment that you get from doing live photography.”

An ‘Accelerant’ and Not a Replacement

In other words, it would be possible to set up photo shoots in a studio and then work on the visual elements within the image using tools like the Titan Image Generator. It’s not clear if Amazon received that kind of feedback from companies using its cloud and AI development services, but cutting costs is often a page in the corporate playbook when new technologies emerge.

Amazon believes the image generator will help all users at the enterprise level use the capability more safely and securely to help accelerate their business objectives — without “taking away individuals’ jobs.” It’s more of an “accelerant” to make them more productive and resourceful, she adds.

Plus, there are differences between product photography and event photography that show the limits of what the AI can do. It can’t generate images about a live event it knows nothing about, including those attending, much less do it in real-time like an on-site photographer could. And while a brand can utilize the AI to complement its own images, Titan can’t pull from a brand’s own image and product resources to create something that way. Copyrighted brands, logos, likenesses, and assets are untouchable that way. First, you take the original image and then plug in the AI to work with it.

“My experience is that brands will still want to be able to take live photos of their products and events in different ways, in a very realistic format,” says Marcus. “Many multimedia companies want to be able to have their own brand associated with content creation, so this is another tool in the toolbox to act as an augmentation.”

Titan Image Generator is currently available as a preview in the United States and only in English, though Amazon also announced that it is looking to expand availability to other markets and languages going forward.

By day, Sandra Herber is a librarian at Humber College in Toronto. But on her time off, she’s an intrepid photographer of Canada’s far-flung landscapes. Her fascination with the art form began at age 12, when her mother passed down her grandfather’s old manual Pentax Spotmatic. “I was so obsessed with it,” Herber says. “I begged my parents to let me set up a darkroom in our basement.” As an adult, she took her camera on various trips through Malaysia, eastern Myanmar and New Guinea, but it was only in 2002, when she enrolled in her first photography workshop, that she began to take her hobby more seriously.

In 2013, Herber flew to Saskatoon to snap some photos of the Prairies’ historic grain elevators, which piqued her interest for their ability to meld form and function. The vast landscape—giant flat fields, endless stretches of sky and isolated old buildings—enchanted her. “Everything about the Prairies is a challenge,” Herber says. Scattered remote communities face unreliable cell service. In the summer, the punishing heat can crest to 35° C or more, while winter temperatures sometimes plummet to minus-40. “It is not a land for the faint of heart,” she says.

READ: This mid-century photographer captured the Inuit’s disappearing way of life

Soon Herber was going back twice a year. In 2015, she made her first winter excursion, which became a lesson in emergency preparedness. She had to plot out and download online maps for her entire route in case she lost cell service. Before she left, she also double-checked her food and fuel supplies, since there would be nowhere to stop along the way. Despite these challenges, that winter in the Prairies brought her obsession with the region into focus. “The grain elevators and any other buildings just stand out so beautifully,” she says.

In the 1930s, these small wooden elevators dotted seemingly every town and village in the Prairies, but the ensuing decades of agricultural industrialization rendered them obsolete; they were steadily replaced with larger concrete structures. Herber is drawn to the old buildings for their visual appeal, of course, but also for their importance to the Prairies’ past. (She is a librarian, after all.) On her trips, she visits other historically significant structures, like a two-classroom schoolhouse in southwestern Manitoba and a 20th-century church built by Ukrainian immigrants who moved to the region in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was one of the first things they constructed so they could have a place to gather. “Many of their descendants have moved to the cities, and that whole culture, that whole way of life, has disappeared,” Herber says. “But these buildings hang on as a memorial.”

Herber tries to scout and map out most of her locations in advance, but trees like this one (captured in 2022 in Saskatchewan) are a stroke of luck. It caught her interest while she was driving, so she quickly pulled over and got to work. “Every other tree in the neighbourhood had lost its autumn foliage,” she says. “But somehow that little tree had hung on to its beautiful golden and rust-coloured leaves.”

This photo shows what was then Canada’s oldest Prairie grain elevator, built in 1897 and once operated by Lake of the Woods Milling Company. When Herber visited it in Elva, Manitoba, in 2022, it was in the process of being dismantled so its wood could be refinished and reclaimed for other uses. Just over a month after her visit, a random spark burned the 124-year-old structure to the ground.

Only a handful of people live in the hamlet of Herronton, Alberta. Herber estimates that its population likely never exceeded 50 or 60, yet in the early 1930s, there were an impressive five grain elevators in the area. The blue-green building, shot in 2018, is the official colour of the Alberta Wheat Pool. Founded in 1923, it was one of the first wheat farmer co-ops on the Prairies and later became part of Viterra, currently the nation’s largest grain handler.

In 2023, Herber spent over an hour driving next to this Saskatchewan field, trying to find the perfect shot of hay bales. The result shows her ability to see beauty in what locals might consider run-of-the-mill. “I’m not saying that those people don’t appreciate the beauty of the Prairies—of course they do,” she says. “But maybe an outsider’s view shows you that something ordinary can be really beautiful.”

For a decade, Herber has been building her scouting map, where she pins locations that she wants to visit and colour-codes ones she wants to return to (or not). She had already photographed this Manitoba grain elevator in the summer, but she came back in 2022 to see it surrounded by snow. This photo was captured after a white-knuckle drive on the Trans-Canada Highway, plagued by four-foot-high snow drifts and plenty of ice.

Grain elevators were painted different colours depending on who owned them. Herber believes that this one, located in Saskatchewan, was once owned by Searle—hence the large, faded “S” at the top. When she took this photo in 2023, she incorporated the power lines; many photographers omit them, but Herber considers them an inevitable and important part of the Prairie landscape.

During Herber’s travels, she sourced a lot of locations from organizations like the Manitoba Historical Society. But in 2022, she came across this barn in southwestern Manitoba while browsing geotagged images online. She usually selects historical subjects for her photographs, but she found the contrast of the red walls against the stark white snow too striking to resist.

This Ukrainian church, not far from Saskatoon, was built in the early 1920s. It replaced the congregation’s original building, which went up in 1905—the same year Saskatchewan became a province. Last year, Herber drove to the church, where she learned that the congregation still exists, although it’s now based in the village of Alvena. “They protect the church,” Herber says. “They come out; they maintain it.”

In 2022, when Herber pulled up to this school in southwestern Manitoba, she was immediately attracted to its vibrant yellow colour. It’s a two-classroom schoolhouse—a departure from the usual single-room ones found in the area at that time—and Herber suspects the community must have taken great pride in it. Although the Coultervale School District dates back to 1887, the one that Herber photographed was constructed in 1914.

We are proud to announce the results of the third-annual PetaPixel Awards where we give honors to a small list of the best new photography products released in the last year as voted by the PetaPixel staff.

Started in 2021, the PetaPixel Awards are designed to be exclusive. Unlike other awards that create a laundry list of categories that give every company a chance to be a winner, and we only pick seven products: best in camera, prime lens, zoom lens, smartphone, computer, software, and photography accessory. We are also continuing a final category that we started last year called “Photography Trend of the Year.”

Methodology: Because PetaPixel’s staff is entirely composed of current and former photographers, all were asked to vote for first, second, and third place across all categories. First-place votes were worth five points, second worth three, and third worth one. In all cases, those who deal directly with sales and marketing were excluded from voting to retain objectivity. No company is even allowed to submit nominations for consideration in the PetaPixel Awards, as all conversation is conducted internally.

At a Glance

Accessory of the Year: Maven Magnetic Filters

How does the phrase go? “Keep it simple, stupid”? That’s really the crux of what makes the Maven Magnetic filters so good. They don’t over-complicate the concept of streamlining the use of filters and they just work. It also helps that the glass they use is top-tier. Color-coded to make it easy to nab the filter you need at a glance and integrating very, very strong magnets to keep them affixed to the front of your lenses, these have become a mainstay with our YouTube team who regularly has to shoot in environments with rapidly changing light.

Originally a Kickstarter from late 2022 and only available widely in 2023, these are the best filters we’ve used in years. Simple and effective, they just plain work.

Software of the Year: Blackmagic Camera App (iOS)

For the first time in PetaPixel Awards history, a smartphone app has claimed top honors in our Software of the Year category. Blackmagic is deserving, as its iOS capture app has not only become the industry standard for shooting high-end video on a smartphone, but it’s doing so for absolutely nothing — it’s free.

The Blackmagic Camera App turns the iPhone into what feels like a dedicated, standalone video camera, runs smoothly, and supports the latest advancements of the iPhone 15 Pro Max. As Filmic Pro has fallen, Blackmagic has risen, and it is so ubiquitous among mobile filmmakers that even Apple uses it.

The rise of Blackmagic’s Camera app was fast, and for very good reason.

Computer of the Year: Apple MacBook Pro with M3 Max

Apple had a busy year in computing and while the M2 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio is impressive, what really blew us away was the performance of the newly-released MacBook Pro with M3 Max. This laptop has made it very hard to recommend any other laptop computer because of the unique combination of battery life, low noise, heat management, and pure computing power — power that doesn’t care if it’s attached to a wall or running on battery. With the addition of better gaming capabilities, the MacBook Pro is really leaping beyond the competition.

Oh, and in a majority of our benchmarking scores, this computer — a laptop, mind you — outperformed the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra.

“The M3 Max is remarkably impressive and in almost every metric we at PetaPixel test, it outperforms the performance of the M1 Ultra inside of the Mac Studio desktop machine. We were all so taken with the M1 Ultra when it first came out but the ensuing chips have not had that same impact since, well, they didn’t improve on that greatness all that much. But put in context, we really do have to give more than a cursory glance to what Apple has accomplished in the past few years in order to really appreciate it, because it is so very impressive,” I wrote in my review.

“I am in awe that Apple has already surpassed the performance of its M1 Ultra in a laptop less than two years after it hit the market. That’s absurd.”

Smartphone of the Year: Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max

Apple has once again nabbed our top honors in the smartphone category. The iPhone 15 Pro Max improves on the previous year’s model on the inside and out, and while there is some debate as to how it performs head-to-head as a photo-taking device against other smartphones like the Google Pixel 8 Pro and OnePlus Open, the vastly superior video capabilities of the handheld make it difficult to choose anything else when looking at the device as a whole.

“It’s easy to write off the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max as being marginal improvements over the iPhone 14 Pro that came before. Similar cameras, similar screens, and similar batteries are to be found. A few tweaks to the photo-taking experience and a new button don’t seem like huge additions, but they are thoughtful changes,” Chris Niccolls explains.

“What I think we should focus on is the changes to the shooting experience brought about by the A17 processor. Everything about the Main camera image quality has been improved and any of the features you would use like Portrait mode or Night mode are also better, regardless of what camera you use. Everything feels faster, sharper, and cleaner.”

Apple has closed the gap on image quality against its contemporaries and continues to push past them when it comes to video capture thanks to the addition of ProRes Log, more framerate and resolution options, and the ability to shoot directly to an attached SSD. From image quality to workflow, everything about the iPhone 15 Pro Max is better and, therefore, worthy of praise.

Zoom Lens of the Year: Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 Di III VC VXD G2

For the second year in a row, Tamron has claimed top honors in the zoom lens category, cementing its place as the premiere manufacturer of high-end zoom optics. While 2023 brought us several outstanding options including the Nikon 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR, the Sony 16-35mm f/2.8 GM II, the Sony 70-200mm f/4 OSS II, and the Sony 20-70mm f/4 (which came in close second to Tamron), the excellent performance mixed with the approachable pricing of the 70-180mm f/2.8 won out.

As explained by Chris Niccolls, this second-generation version of the 70-180mm f/2.8 improves upon the first in notable ways that make it worthy of praise.

“The bokeh is much more natural and pleasing to the eye, and sharpness has been refined over an already very sharp lens to begin with. Although the Tamron 70-180mm f/2.8 VXD VC G2 is slightly heavier and larger it is still a very easy-to-carry lens by f/2.8 telephoto standards. Tamron has managed to make a great lens even better and this adds even more value to an already affordable optic.”

We all hope to see this lens come to other mounts beyond Sony E in 2024 — all photographers deserve the option to use it.

Prime Lens of the Year: Sigma 14mm f/1.4 DG DN Art

With a knockout combination of excellent optical performance and top-tier build quality, it’s hard not to love the Sigma 14mm f/1.4 DG DN Art. It is, absolutely, a specialized lens but it won over the PetaPixel team due mainly to the fact it can perform extremely well wide open. Optically, you can’t argue with what this lens can produce. It is an extremely impressive lens, especially given the combination of its ultra-wide field of view and its wide-open f1/.4 aperture. Usually, that combination of features leads to some level of compromise, but that didn’t happen with the Sigma 14mm f/1.4 Art and for that, this lens deserves praise.

“Excellent optical performance coupled with professional build quality; what’s not to love? The Sigma 14mm continues the tradition of Art series lenses, delivering the goods at a decent price. Despite the larger physical size of the lens, the trade-offs are worth it,” Chris Niccolls wrote in his review.

This was a close vote. The Sigma 14mm f/1.4 Art won its honor by just one point over the second-place selection, the Nikon 135mm f/1.8 S Plena.

Camera of the Year: Nikon Z8

For the second year in a row, Nikon has captured the top honor of camera of the year, this time with the Z8. Last year, Nikon nabbed the honor with the Z9 and while many might argue that the Z8 is just a repackaged, smaller version of the Z9, what it offers for the price went unmatched by anyone else in 2023.

It is the best camera for serious photographers and represents Nikon’s huge turnaround from just a few years ago. It’s highly capable for both photo and video use making it more compelling for more users than even the Z9, even if it drops a few features to reach a more compact size and lower asking price.

As Chris Niccolls said in his review: “The Z9 is still going to be the king of the hill in the Nikon lineup. Everything that I love about the Z8 is really a testament to just how good the Z9 was at its release. But the Z8 is better suited for so many people and at a more tolerable price too… I’m happy to say that the Nikon Z8 is as good as we had initially hoped. If you are a Nikon DSLR shooter that is ready to upgrade, or a professional photographer looking for a new compact kit, order one now.”

This vote was not close. The Z8 received all but one first-place vote and won in an absolute landslide with over 30 points more than the closest competitor.

Trend of the Year: Mirrorless Lenses are Living Up to Original Promises

Over the course of 2023, mirrorless lens design has become remarkably sophisticated. We’ve seen a 300mm f/2.8 lens from Sony become more compact and lighter than any before it while at the same time seen a 24-105mm f/2.8 from Canon. What is clear is that moving to mirrorless and the promises photographers were told would be the positive result of that is coming to fruition.

Mirrorless lenses are not only smaller and more impressive, they focus faster and weigh less. It’s an amazing time to be a photographer and the technology advancements we’re seeing can’t be understated. All lens makers deserve a round of applause for what they are achieving.

Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.