I’m not sure where else to start other than to say… Insight is officially here. I’ve spent every free minute I’ve had this past year conceptualizing, coding, and now launching, https://insight.photo.

It’s been a long journey since May in Prague, where I attempted to test (what was at the time) a nugget of an idea. The premise basically  failed, and the video turned into an instructional about how I prism and use the ring of fire:

But, by the end of June I had worked out the tech stack to get a workflow that felt seamless, and fast. 10 seconds after hitting one button… my original jpeg image that I wanted to iterate on was texted to my phone, and within a minute I had 4 ai renders with a variety of poses, and compositions… all without having to stop and wait while shooting – ever.

I won’t delve into the specifics of Insight here, as there’s plenty of material I’ve already shared, but I do want to thank everyone here for their support the past 6 months. I haven’t been able to post here as much as I wanted because (believe it or not) building out a tool like this, that can actually scale to more than just one person using it, is a ton of work… and of course I had to do all this during the height of wedding season:

I actually just edited and delivered two sessions and a wedding before sitting down to write this and launch!

For a lot of photographers, I know it will take some time to convince them of the utility, and usefulness of a tool like this. Part of why I decided to film my progress during development in Prague, Paris, Iceland, and Poland (the latter two are still being edited), was to prove for myself that having this new creative input was actually making a positive change in my work. As I’ve posted about before… how do you measure inspiration? 

It took practice, and time, but even if Insight fails as a business, I’ll continue to use it for myself. The reason I know that now is because every single time I’ve not used it during a shoot, I’ve regretted it.

This happened just a few days ago while I was photographing this man:

The left image is what I was hired to do – simple headshot style portrait. I sent that off to insight after he had left the room, just to see what it would create. The center portrait (a stitched 3 image Brenizer method) is what I made just before that, to get a more serious and creative portrait. When I received the insight suggestions (aside from that silly giant hand one), I absolutely wish I had used it at the beginning of the shoot so I could have implemented his hands into his portrait somehow, the way Insight suggested.

Insight’s results are extremely applicable because it doesn’t just render pose ideas. It renders the context of where you’re shooting through lighting, clothing style, and it even matches the focal length and depth of field of the lens you’re using. The results it gives you (usually) are extremely applicable to the actual environment you’re shooting in. This is a huge help for actually allowing you to see how your couples could look in a frame – instead of using a Pinterest board of random inspiration or something. Since the renders are generative Ai… they’re also completely unique in existence.  

I am still planning a tutorial post here about how to set the tech stack for Insight up for yourself, but it’s extremely complex and expensive – about $145/ month for just one person. That high cost is actually why I realized this should be setup as a service – we can all benefit due to economies of scale. 

I’ve never worked this hard on anything before, and if you decide to give Insight a try, I hope you’re confused by that statement. I hope it works so seamlessly and naturally that you can’t imagine how it could possibly have taken me more than a few days to build. 

I thought that leveraging a phone’s SMS/WhatsApp texting would be an easy workaround to having to build an app for this, and save me lots of time, but boy was I wrong! Yes, it is an elegant solution to not have an app for you to install, but there’s so much happening behind the scenes – it’s hard to even begin explaining.

Aside from Insight – the next post I’m going to work on is a review of the Nikon Zf, but I think this summarizes my thoughts pretty well:

At my core I always want to be a photographer. Anything I work on that’s not actually out making photographs… I want to serve me in a way that makes me a better photographer when I’m back out shooting. Patreon has been that. My workshops have been that, and now… Insight is that.

This is just the beginning!