I’ve got friends who are pro photographers. Some of them have portrait photography – headshots – as an integral part of their businesses. Those photographers are about to have the metaphorical rug pulled out from under them by artificial intelligence.

Let’s look at the typical process if I wanted to renew my headshots. I’d book time with a photographer, figure out what I’m going to wear, and head to their studio for at least a half-hour to get pictures taken, or meet them out at some mutually agreeable location to serve as a background.

What if I decide I want a different outfit? Well, I’d better bring it along, or book another session. What if the background isn’t what I thought it was, or wasn’t available? Either book another session, or start paying for some Photoshop magic. What if I want a different pose? Call and book again.

Total cost? If you want quality, it’s not going to be cheap, in terms of time or money.

The DIY approach

Compare that with how I did a recent set of headshots for myself. I spent 30 minutes finding a couple dozen pictures of myself that I liked, and prepping them for machine learning. A computer spent about an hour crunching the numbers on said pictures and spitting out an AI model.

Then, I hit the ground running with free software (Stable Diffusion in my case) to start making headshots of me in different outfits, in different poses, in different situations (fighting space ninjas, for one), and with different backgrounds. All I had to do was describe what I wanted in the picture, e.g. me, in sci fi armor, fighting space ninjas inside a ship; and what I didn’t want in the picture, e.g. bad composition, weird expressions, or me wearing a helmet.

I went pretty generic for many of them – jake, headshot, professional portrait, forest background, golden hour… let the computer make 20 or so iterations, and three or four are going to be knockouts. 

All this took me under two hours. And now that the model’s been created, I can update my headshots in a few minutes – the only limitation is my creativity in crafting what’s known as a “prompt” for the AI in Stable Diffusion.

Need proof? Look at that picture of me at the top of this story. It’s 100 percent digital, created from the model of me. I’d kill to have that shirt, though.

What you can do about it

This sudden, seismic shift in what anyone with a decently powered computer can do with photos is going to wreck the headshot business for photographers who can’t adapt.

So how can they adapt? By co-opting the process, making it so the client doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting, and turning AI photos to their advantage.

Instead of making headshots for clients, you’re going to be in the business of making head models for clients. That can mean helping them curate existing shots that will work for an AI model, or creating all-new shots that  the computer easily can digest. It’s easier said than done – AI training tends to have hangups if pictures have similar backgrounds, or the subject is wearing the same outfit in too many pictures.

Once you’ve got that model, it’s time to become an AI prompting expert. With good prompts (and sometimes other tools like Photoshop’s new AI generative fill), you can start cranking out exactly what your client is looking for. It’s easy to go a step beyond and stylize the photos as everything from watercolors to cubist masterpieces.

On the service-after-the-sale end, it’d be trivial to set up a web portal where your client can even experiment with prompts and looks themselves, then go to you for a full-scale version. You could even offer just the generation of the model as a standalone service.

The time to act is NOW

If you don’t have some kind of plan to deal with AI, then have a plan to deal with the chunk of your business it’s going to eat, or the chunk of your business that’ll get eaten by a competitor who takes a week (or less!) to learn the ins and outs of artificial intelligence-assisted photographic techniques.

The good news is that it really isn’t that difficult to wrap your head around, especially if you’re an experienced photographer. But the time is now – discover how you can use AI to your advantage before your competition does.

Jake Hallman is available as a consultant. For more information, email him at Jake@jake.hallman.com, or call (912) 536-2314.