Doing any of those things well is very difficult – you need to buy the right equipment, you need to do your homework (thanks, PhotoPills!), and you need to convince your client that you’re the right person for the job, and that they should pay you for it. I’ve chased storms across the USA, I’ve shot the northern lights – and taught others how to do it – and I’ve photographed the Milky Way. I’ve done quite a bit of what we’ll call sky photography. We're always uneasy about something – whether it's 'where we put that lens cap?', or 'did I charge my battery?' – so it’s only natural that micro-concerns give way to proper anxiety when it comes to the security of our jobs. Of course, photographers are uneasy about this. Blown away barely begins to cover it – take an image with a boring sky, choose a more interesting one, and bosh: your picture is rejuvenated, enlivened, headed for the front page of Reddit or the top of the Instagram feed. ![]() I reviewed Luminar AI a few weeks ago, and as ever, deployed my arguably unhealthy brand of skepticism headed in. Of course, photo fakery has been around since the beginning of photography – but what’s interesting here is just how easy it is to make a genuinely photorealistic effect using the likes of Luminar AI, which produced the image in question. Take an image with a boring sky, choose a more interesting one, and bosh: your picture is rejuvenated, enlivened, headed for the front page of Reddit or the top of the Instagram feed. And it was in full effect when our anonymous Redditor took a perfectly good night-time image and dropped an egregious Milky Way background down. From those annoying chatbots when you’re online shopping, to Instagram’s mysterious algorithm deciding which posts you see first, artificial intelligence has become a shorthand for “any time a computer makes a decision instead of you". The secret was AI, which you will have noticed is now everywhere. The Milky Way? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the world? No.
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