Why I Stopped Shooting for the Grid?
Some realisations arrive slowly. This one took a mood board, a wedding, and the age of AI.
Let me tell you about mood boards.
You know the ones. A carefully curated folder of references: poses, lighting, that specific shade of golden that apparently only exists in Tuscany sent by a client who has spent three weeks on Pinterest preparing for your thirty minute conversation. You look through it, nod, say "yes absolutely we can do something like this" and then go and do exactly that.
And you do it well. That's the thing nobody tells you about executing someone else's vision — it can feel genuinely satisfying. There's a craft to it. The client is happy, the images look great, and for a moment everything is working exactly as it should.
It was only later, sitting alone with the pictures, that I'd notice something. A mild flatness. Like finishing a meal that looked incredible and realising halfway through that you weren't really hungry.
Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet, persistent gap between the work I was making and anything that felt like mine.
I didn't quit commercial photography in a blaze of artistic principle. That would make a better story. What actually happened is I kept travelling with my camera, kept taking pictures of whatever I felt like, and slowly started noticing that those images the unasked-for ones, the ones nobody commissioned felt completely different when I looked back at them.
More alive somehow. More like something I'd actually made rather than delivered.
I started putting them on Instagram. Which was lovely, until Instagram started having opinions.
Here's the thing about Instagram that takes a while to see it has a brief too. It's just invisible. You figure out what gets saves, what gets shares, and a small sensible voice in your head starts whispering maybe frame it a little wider, maybe shoot at this time of day, maybe this kind of image does better on Tuesdays. Before long you're back to executing a brief. You just wrote it yourself this time, which feels more sophisticated but is essentially the same situation.
I ditched it eventually. Best decision. Also not the point of this essay.
The point is what I found on the other side of both experiences — the client work and the grid years.
When you shoot without any brief at all, something uncomfortable happens. There's no one to please, which sounds wonderful in theory. In practice it means the only question left is what you actually see. And if you've spent enough time optimising for other people's answers, your own takes a while to show up.
But it does show up. Slowly, quietly, through repetition.
You go out on a random evening with no assignment and you shoot what stops you. Then you do it again. And again. And after enough of these sessions you start noticing patterns not ones you chose, but ones that emerged. A kind of light you keep returning to. A preferred distance from your subject. The types of ordinary scenes that make your hand move before your brain does.
That's a signature. It didn't come from studying photographers you admire or deciding what aesthetic you want. It came from paying attention to yourself long enough to notice what's already there.
Which, honestly, is more interesting than anything a mood board has ever produced.
Now. About AI.
AI can generate a correct photograph. A beautiful one. One that matches any brief ever written, in any style, in about forty seconds. This is genuinely impressive and also, if your entire value as a photographer lives inside "executing briefs well" a bit of a situation.
I'm not being alarmist. I'm being practical.
The working photographers - wedding, commercial, product aren't going anywhere. There will always be a couple who wants a human being at their wedding rather than a prompt. But the ones who will continue to matter, who will continue to be sought out specifically, are the ones who bring something to the brief that wasn't in the brief. A specific eye. An unrepeatable sensibility. Something that makes a client say we want you rather than we want a photographer.
That something is built on Sunday evenings with no assignment. It's built in the unposted, uncommissioned, unoptimised hours.
Shoot for yourself more. Not as self-care. Not as a creative palate cleanser. As the actual work. The work that makes the other work worth anything.
Photography stopped feeling like a skill somewhere around the time I stopped needing it to perform for anyone. Now it's more like a philosophy. A particular way of paying attention to the world.
The camera is just how I take notes.
Comments