I made a TikTok after months of being nagged by my friends and colleagues. There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes content that I am slowly uploading there. Sometimes, at about 3 in the morning when I finish my work and get slightly depressed, I go on TikTok and scroll through videos tagged #photography. While this won’t be an article targeting TikTok photographers, or an article shaming people for following trends, it will be an article discussing what trends there are now, and what’s possibly dangerous with them.

The Upgrade Wave

The trend that has been consistent since day one is the upgrade trend. Photographers seem to be insatiable when it comes to what gear they have and what they could have. I am one of them, frankly. While my upgrades are slightly odd, they are very much in line with the trend. A few weeks ago, I decided I want to own a medium-format system. A quick search online revealed some really juicy options when it comes to this: namely, a fantastic camera going for EUR 4,500. I would get an XF body, 80mm blue ring lens, and an IQ250 back. While I am the first one to shout that what you have is enough, and you can shoot on a 5D Mark II without a noticeable problem, I am also the first one to go and try to justify an upgrade to a medium-format system.

Other photographers may not be looking to upgrade to a Phase One, but they will be looking at things such as the new global-shutter Sony, or any of the new mirrorless cameras. The upgrade seems like the next best thing that will unlock new possibilities that your current camera doesn’t offer. This trend is perpetuated by camera reviews, marketing material, and the inner feeling of not having enough. Let me ask you (and myself) this: When was the last time your clients said that your camera is not enough? I’ll be the first one to say never. My clientele is fully satisfied with the still images I deliver. They might be unhappy with the lighting or the visual direction, but never the files themselves. Even a Canon 5Ds is overkill, frankly. I could do my work on a 5D Mark II and nobody would bat an eyelid. The requirements for delivering stills have largely not changed. You will know when you need a better camera. Unless you are doing some mad fast action photography, what you currently have is more than enough, assuming your camera is made later than 2010.

Lenses are a bit of a tricky one, but largely the same principle applies. Take me as an example. For now, I am shooting on a Canon 5Ds with either a 50mm f/1.4 or a 24-70mm f/2.8 generation 1 lens. Sure, maybe in a few months, I will be stupid enough to buy a Phase One, but 95% of my work has been done on that 5Ds and a 24-70mm f/2.8 that can’t resolve enough detail. That setup alone has been more than plenty to do 99% of my jobs, and when it wasn’t enough, I either rented a Phase One or shot on my 5D Mark IV due to faster burst speed. Sharpness is a bourgeois concept. You can fully get away by shooting on mid-range EF lenses, which have become super cheap now. The reduced flange distance and improved sharpness are really nothing to lose your mind over. It is tempting to buy it, seeing that every cool photographer shoots on it now. However, if you look beyond YouTube and find real working pros, chances are they will be rocking the old EF glass, which is enough.

Visual Style Trends

The other trend that I keep seeing pop up is the visual style trend. This is a useful trend, as knowing what’s in and what’s out can help you a lot to build a viable portfolio, but you still should be careful with what you shoot and how you shoot it. The main thing is that you need to have the foundation of your style down before adjusting it to the trends. Moreover, your visual style will be relevant if you are taking the right references in. What do I mean by that? This is all assuming you are looking to make money with your photography in the commercial market. The right references would be looking at websites such as Creative Review, or reading the British Journal of Photography. The wrong references would be whatever “commercial” means on social media. If there’s a photographer showing how they did a commercial, chances are they were never hired to do the actual shoot. If it’s behind the scenes of an actual commercial, it will be shared on the page of the brand, or on the page of the photographer, and the same still will also be on the Instagram of the team that worked on that production. However, most commercials are kept under wraps, as sharing behind the scenes would immediately mean that competing brands can copy the style, which harms the photographer. There are strict rules about this. I don’t allow sharing behind the scenes from my shoots for those reasons. My work has been copied, even without behind-the-scenes, so if I give away my actual setups, I will find myself being booked less. Copying is a real problem, and my clients care about their visuals being authentic. But I digress.

There are a few visual trends that you should be aware of. The most important one is the trend for slightly imperfect photography. In 2024, any kid with a phone can produce a nice soft light. Most makeup artists have a ring light and can do a fantastic job at getting a good picture. The knowledge of how to set up a softbox is not unique to you, like it was a decade ago. Most campaigns have left this style of lighting as well. For example, if you look at the latest Schiaparelli campaign, you will find that they are using direct hard light. This is the nostalgia for the pictures from point-and-shoot cameras that is coming into play. The ’90s style of very simple photography is popular now. What this means for you is that you need to have images that represent that time period. The greatest thing is that you don’t need to replicate the style to the pixel; you need to have some elements of it. One such element could be that you use direct flash, or hard light in some form. Perhaps the composition of your image is nostalgic of that period. Just look at what’s going on with wedding photography now: clients are asking for pictures reminiscent of ’90s photography. Soft light and gorgeous tones are no longer popular. Clients want a black and white picture with head-on flash.

Of course, I can’t discuss all of the trends in photography in 2024 in one article. The article would be simply too long to read. But you know the ones to avoid and the ones to follow, in your own way. To close off, I will say that I will probably get a medium-format system at some point, despite it having no effect on the number of jobs I am getting. Why? Well, that’s best saved for another article.

Scarlett Page is one of the featured speakers at The Photography & Video Show next month, taking place March 16-19 at the NEC in Birmingham England.

For the first 15 years of her life as a music photographer, Scarlet Page succeeded in making her mark without, as she says, “using my dad’s name to get on.” So adept had she become at keeping the name of her famous father to herself, that the picture editor of The Sunday Times commissioned her to shoot him without making the family connection. 

That man is legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist and founder Jimmy Page. Scarlet has now chalked up nearly 30 years photographing rock stars, including her father’s contemporaries. Many feature in her book and exhibition Resonators, a collection of guitar heroes including Paul McCartney, Mark Knopfler, Peter Green, Brian May and Jeff Beck to name but a few. 

Naturally, I ask her if being the daughter of Jimmy Page has been a help or hindrance. Quickly, she answers: “I never went in there saying, ‘Oh, do you know who I am?’ It’s really not my thing. The only time that I did present myself as my dad’s daughter was when I was doing the Resonators project because it was
a way of introducing myself, and saying: ‘I’ve been a photographer for this long and, also, this is my father.’ I shot him almost last in the project as I wanted to do everyone first.” 

In every other respect, Scarlet’s life as a photographer has followed the typical path of learning the craft the hard way, starting with a year as an assistant to Ross Halfin… 

Scarlet Page

 Scarlet Page is the daughter of Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and the French model Charlotte Martin. She studied photography at the University of Westminster and worked the following year as an assistant to rock photographer Ross Halfin.

Scarlet shoots for major record companies, working with artists such as The Rolling Stones, Spandau Ballet, Brian Ferry, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stereophonics. Her first book, Resonators, in 2015, followed an acclaimed touring exhibition of her portraits featuring over 30 rock guitar heroes. 

She is a member of the Association of Photographers’ women’s group, f22. In 2020, she was a winner in the Portrait of Britain Awards. She has worked extensively for charities including Teenage Cancer Trust, Scope, CALM, and Warchild. 

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Alpha Males: Working for a mental health charity, Scarlet produced a striking collection of portraits to support a suicide prevention campaign

Alpha Males: Working for a mental health charity, Scarlet produced a striking collection of portraits to support a suicide prevention campaign

Alpha Males: Working for a mental health charity, Scarlet produced a striking collection of portraits to support a suicide prevention campaign

This interview first appeared in N-Photo magazine. Scarlet is a headline speaker at The Photography & Video Show. You can find out about his talks at the Show website, and you can get 20% off tickets with our exclusive discount code.

You might be interested in the best Nikon cameras along with the best Nikon lenses – and particularly the best Nikon Z lenses designed for its mirrorless cameras. 

Did artificial intelligence technology take over photography? No, it hasn’t, and it probably never will. But here is how AI might have been helping you behind the scenes all along.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is perhaps the biggest buzzword in the world of photography and tech for 2023, and it continues to be a widely discussed topic in 2024. This stems from the fact that the industry has had mixed reactions about the emergence of AI tools for photography and raised the question of whether this kind of technology puts photographers’ jobs at risk. However, much of the alarm and resistance towards this kind of technology often comes from photographers who have not fully understood what AI actually is and what it actually does. The discussion on that can go way too deep into technicalities, but for the benefit of a simple discussion, let’s start by saying that AI will not mean robots will be taking over our jobs.

The video below is a discussion among myself, landscape and travel photographer Elia Locardi, and portrait and wedding photographer Jiggie Alejandrino, where we talk about how AI has affected our post-production workflow.

Artificial Intelligence in Different Forms

AI comes in various forms that have current applications in a photographer’s workflow. But from a wider perspective of technology, artificial intelligence can be seen as just a more advanced and more intricate level of computing processes that can be applied to anything and everything we do on digital devices. In a sense, the technology is not new at this point; at most, it has just matured to become more capable. AI was introduced in smartphone cameras at least seven years ago as a form of enhanced image processing through scene detection and local adjustments. This early form of AI in smartphone cameras was an improved version of the automatic mode that almost every camera has. It offered better metering and color processing through scene detection, which in effect just made it easier for smartphone photographers to take better photos without having to edit or refine so much as it uses cues to detect the scene and match applicable settings and adjustments for the detected scene. In recent months, AI-backed editing features have been made on smartphones, such as Samsung’s new S24 series, where one could easily remove objects and even subjects from the photos taken by the phone.

In conventional interchangeable lens cameras, Sony introduced AI processing in its focusing system, which first appeared on the Sony A7RV. From personal use, it was apparent that this form of AI boosts the capabilities of the processor to detect and track the selected subject through eye-AF tracking. Instead of simply detecting where the eye of the subject is and subsequently focusing on it, the AI processor is now able to predict and anticipate the motion of the moving subject to be able to track and focus faster, thereby reducing the probability of missing focus on some frames. This has been made available on other cameras that were released after it and is also now being offered by other camera brands.

AI in Post-Production

On the other hand, AI takes more diverse forms in post-production. Various tools have emerged that introduce AI processes into different steps of post-production. Some tools use AI to automate the process of developing raw images. These tools use AI-powered scene detection to apply exposure, color, and contrast treatment that is appropriate for the specific shot. Some tools use AI to detect commonly removed skin elements in the retouching process to reduce the amount of time spent editing portraits. Some tools offer exponentially greater precision in cloning out and filling in identified spots on a surface.

What needs to be said about AI in editing is that almost none of these tools are actually new. For decades now, photographers have been using tools like content-aware fill, which is just a more intuitive version of older tools such as the heal tool or the patch tool. With smarter AI capabilities, this has now evolved into the remove tool, which is just a much smarter version of the earlier tools that is more effective in preserving the details and continuity of visual elements that it is being used on.

As a landscape and architectural photographer, I personally experienced having to trace out the sky in images using tools like the pen tool, the magic wand, or the lasso tool for hours on a single image just to be able to selectively edit them or blend in a new sky. In the past couple of years, this was made easier by a smarter “select sky” option or a semi-automated sky replacement module that allowed the user to select any image and use it as the sky on the photo being worked on, and that includes images (supposedly) legally acquired to be used for that purpose. This ultimately automated the process that used to take hours and compressed it into a few seconds. Now with the use of those tools and with generative fill, the process is made much more efficient and infuses options generated from what are supposedly consensually referenced images. All of that said, all of these were technically possible with Photoshop in the past; the difference lies in the speed and precision with which the tasks are performed.

Generative AI and Photography

Perhaps the form of AI that causes much of the worry would be the generative form of AI that has the ability to create illustrations either as standalone images or as part of a photograph that is being edited. It is undeniable that there have been instances where AI-generated images were maliciously used in photography competitions. There have also been instances where commercial campaigns were called out for using AI-generated illustrations, specifically for brands that sell tools for digital artists. It is undeniable that, in the wrong hands, AI can be used to cheat, mislead, or undermine photographers and, on a larger scale, it can be used for spreading disinformation.

However, at this point, it does not seem like AI tools can do anything that human creatives cannot. If anything, they can only do them faster but not necessarily better. The core of AI is to emulate human responses to automate what was previously only doable by human work, but it seems (at least from how I see it) that the effect of what is done with AI depends entirely on the intention of whoever creates with it or whoever uses the images. That then simplifies this sophisticated artificial intelligence technology created from learned neural responses as merely a tool. In the same way that a hammer can be used both to build and to destroy, AI tools, from this perspective, remain to be what they are — tools. This is where laws, regulations, and ethics need to step in; to prevent this new tool from being used to cause the same old harm that we have been preventing in the past.

Implications of AI in Photography

The possibilities that come with AI are endless and almost impossible to bind, as with any other form of advancement in technology. It can definitely lead to unfortunate circumstances when used improperly, which is where the importance of human intervention, regulation, and government steps in. When it comes to how generative AI can be used for malicious things, it is up to us collectively to step in and prevent this.

On the other hand, AI tools in photography do offer a lot of possibilities. As with any other tool, AI can offer much better efficiency in our work as photographers. In-camera, AI has been helpful in minimizing the role of luck and increasing precision in our cameras. In post-production, AI tools can offer to do days’ worth of work in only a matter of minutes if properly used and prompted to achieve the correct results. Any photographer who shoots raw can be spared from hours of raw developing or using presets that still need refining, but this can only happen if the photographer has developed a consistent style and intentionality. Portrait photographers can now more efficiently retouch their subjects based on their style, preference, and the extent of processing they choose. Commercial photographers can now do everything they’ve been doing on Photoshop for the past couple of decades with much more precision while only taking a minuscule fraction of the time.

Authenticity Will Never Lose Value

As a landscape photographer, I can say that in some way of looking at it, landscape photography was as seemingly threatening as AI is now to landscape painters and visual artists before the dawn of photography. However, there seems to be barely any conflict between landscape painters and landscape photographers because the demand for either of them is just based on the preference of an entirely different audience. At the same time, as an architectural photographer, the most constant challenge is getting a client to spend more for photography of the actual structure instead of just using the already-available design perspective that was there way before the building was erected. In this case, it doesn’t seem like AI-generated images will be any more of a threat than other ways of illustrating an architectural project.

For portrait photographers, wedding photographers, event photographers, even more so, do I personally believe that authenticity, specifically the value of having genuine images of a person or event, probably won’t decline. AI, specifically generative AI, will definitely cause and actually has caused ethical dilemmas in terms of the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, but overall, photography is the art form that has the most potential to uphold truth and authenticity even in the age of advanced technology, for as long as the line between art and documentation is clearly maintained.

But for an individual photographer, with this not-so-new advancement in technology, and with human intervention factored in, AI tools offer two options. We can either spend less time editing so that we can take in more clients and shoot more, or we can spend less time editing so that we can spend more time for ourselves outside of work. If anything, this might be a reminder that most of us probably started learning photography for the sake of taking pictures — not editing them, so technology is now offering to take the bulk of that (still) necessary step of the process so that we could focus on the creative aspect.

Tamron – Need lightweight, compact mirrorless lenses? Tamron has you covered, with superior optics perfect for any situation. With weather sealing and advanced image stabilization, you’ll open up your creative possibilities.

Radiant Photo – Radiant Photo superior quality finished photos with perfect color rendition, delivered in record time. Your photos — simply RADIANT. The way they are meant to be.

AfterShoot – Cull and edit unlimited images for a flat fee, using personalized AI that adapts to your style and preferences. Enjoy a 30-day free trial and an exclusive 10% discount on payment.

Mylio Photos – Access your photos from anywhere, without the cloud! Easily showcase your photos on-the-go, resolve duplicates, find faces and look for those stunning locations.

B&H – B&H is a world renowned supplier of all the gear photographers, videographers, and cinematographers need and want to create their very best work.

MPB – Grab used but perfectly working cameras and lenses for less, or turn your old gear into cash by trading and selling them on MPB!