Photography Side Hustle
Photography Side Hustle
Did AI Just Kill Product Photography?
Episode 199 - AI is starting to make certain genres obsolete.
The Transcript page - https://photographysidehustle.com/199
Google Nano Banana
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Hey, how's it going? I'm Andy Jones, and this is episode 199 of the Photography Side Hustle Podcast.
So this week, I came across a YouTube video entitled “Google just made photography obsolete. Now I've been waiting for this to happen for the last year, but it didn't seem to be getting any closer. That is, until Google came up with Nano banana.
Most people use mid-journey to manipulate images, and the results were pretty good. They could come up with some really good stuff, but for exact copies of any image that you've put in there, it wasn't that good at replicating it.
But now Google seems to have mastered the art, and from what I've seen, there is no reason why anyone would need to book a product photographer to come up with promotional images.
Now the video that I mentioned is by f-stoppers, who put out some excellent videos. I'll put links to it in the show notes, the transcript, and I'll also put it in the Facebook group.
You really do need to see this video and decide for yourself. It is so fast, just 10 to 20 seconds to come up with full-size images. It is incredible. And if you think it needs a professional image to work with, you're wrong because you can get just as good results using your phone.
I took a photograph with my phone of a bottle of wine on the coffee table in the living room. I didn't do any special lighting I uploaded it to my laptop, then opened it in the AI and gave it a description. I wanted it to be in a studio setting with black background and black foreground. From start to finish, it took 8 minutes, and that was me trying to come up with a description of what I wanted it to do. If I had the wording exactly right the first time, it would have only taken 5 minutes, not even.
So now think about it from the position of the customer. You've got a store. You've got lots of different products, and you're thinking about getting a photographer. It's going to cost you a few thousand dollars to get your images photographed and put on your website. Now all they have to do is pull out their phone. Take photographs of each product. Go on, Nano banana and tell it what they want. The results are so professional.
The next test I did was with the same image of the bottle of wine. I asked it to place it on the table in a restaurant, and again, the results were amazing.
So you might have noticed I haven't put out any new episodes for quite a few weeks, and that is because I decided to take the summer off. I just needed to recharge my batteries and think about something else. That is the reason I haven't been in the Facebook group for a few weeks, too. But I did just take a look, and there is a question from Dan Ritchie, who's looking for an app so that he can transpose his images onto the walls of clients so they get a good idea of what the photo will look like in their own home. And he's said that every app that he's used up to now is so expensive.
Well, I've got some good news for Dan because this same AI, Nano banana, will allow you to put your images on the walls of your clients.
My first test was to upload an image that I had taken and told it to resize it to 24x36 inches, and put it on a mid-gray wall in a living room over a red couch. Oh, and I also added that I wanted it in a black wooden frame.
The result was so professional. It's as good as any of the apps out there, and it didn't cost anything. You could also upload the image that you want on the wall, upload the image of the client's wall and tell it what size you want.
You could say you want an acrylic print. You can pick any size or frame, and you can dictate how thick the frame is going to be. Whether the image is matted, or you might just want it to be a canvas. The hardest thing you've got to do is make a list of all the things you want and put them into a sentence or two.
No, I don't believe the commercial product photography will disappear overnight. But I do think the number of business people out there looking to hire a photographer is going to shrink. There will still be a lot of people who are not blessed technically and will want someone else to do it for them. So this could be an opportunity to get into product photography with a very small investment in equipment. In fact, you could probably just do this with your phone.
Just think, you turn up with a phone. You take a bunch of photographs. Go home and run them all through an AI, and the day after, you give them all their images and collect the cash for doing it.
In the video, he used AI-generated images of models, had a photograph of a dress and merged the two into one image. It was amazing.
You've got to remember that these AI’s are the worst they're ever going to be. From here on in, they're only going to get better. I can see cell phone images of people's faces being manipulated into beautiful business portraits or whatever you want.
Anyway, you've got to roll with the technology. It's no good just throwing your arms up in the air and walking away. You need to think about how you can use it to your advantage, and there are lots of ways to use it.
So check out the video and give it a try yourself.
Okay, that's all I've got on AI’s at the moment.
I'll be back soon with more waffle. Talk to you soon. Bye
F-Stoppers Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrY_WoleAJs&t=2s
Google AI - https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat