Stop Treating AI Like a Camera. Start Treating It Like an Employee.
How 10 Photographers Will Fire Their Clunky Software to Build Their Own AI Tools.
I help photographers and creative entrepreneurs over 40 reclaim their confidence, cut through the noise, and build bold, independent lives through no-BS insight, experience, and action. Welcome to my Substack.
I am glad you are here.
There is a bottleneck forming in this business.
It’s not your portfolio.
It’s not your mailer.
It’s not your Instagram, Behance, Facebook, or Pinterest.
It’s a constant battle, it seems. A constant focus on negativity and worry.
But folks, we commercial photographers are fighting the wrong damn battle.
While we are so focused on image generation and the possible existential threat that it imposes on us, the real danger is not keeping up with the other changes that ARE existential threats.
AI is here.
I repeat, AI is here.
Do not be shocked.
Do not be steamrolled.
Do not be gaslit.
You won’t be able to hide from it, so you damned well be ready to work with it.
Whatever it is we shoot, we spend more time on administration and marketing than we do in the studio. And it doesn’t matter if it is food, product, lifestyle. The repetitive, mundane tasks that eat up our day are the first we have to deal with.
Every hour you spend wrestling a bid into fruition, dealing with outdated CRM, returning redundant emails, making proposals that never get read… this stuff eats up our days. Our weeks.
And most of the tools we work with every day are clunky, slow, and very long in the tooth.
(C’mon, making ugly ol’ PDF bids is really behind the curve in these modern times.)
And business, the very core of our work… business… starts to become a drag, a drudgery that pulls us into the dark abysses of dark studio, brown liquor sort of place.
OK, maybe I am being a bit hyperbolic, but you know what I mean.
I want to share my deep belief with you about Artificial Intelligence.
AI won’t take the place of your creative eye. It won’t damage your creativity, it will enhance it. And, no, I’m not talking about MidJourney or ChatGPT image making.
I am talking about generating bids in seconds.
I mean reviewing contracts, finding red flags, and addressing them. In seconds.
Client outreach becomes fun again, and it takes so much less time to do that it’s no longer a burden.
It’ll take over your back office.
If you let it.
And you should damned well let it.
Get past thinking that making a pretty picture is the main use of artificial intelligence.
Instead, let’s treat AI as a way to get more done.
It’s the ability to sit down and tell an LLM to make a custom bidding calculator that fits your exact day rate, licensing fees, and styling costs.
It can make a personalized, animated Statement of Work that defends your price before the client even sees the final number.
Two years ago, you had to hire a developer to build these systems.
Today, there is no barrier to entry. I will show you how to do it. In 8 weeks.
If you can tell a person what to do on a set, you can tell an AI what to do to make your business run more smoothly. Faster. With lovely polish.
You’ll stop renting software that doesn’t quite fit when you learn how to use tools to make your own calculators, proposal generators, and outreach sequencers.
You can start making digital assets that work even when you’re not awake.
Friction will stop even the best machines, and it is no different for us as creatives. And there is so much friction in this business that we have to find ways to keep that friction to a minimum.
I am teaching a workshop, 6 weekends, to teach you how to develop tools with AI.
HERE’S THE CURRICULUM
The 6-Part Class Structure
The Micro-Win (Gemini): Building the automated email outreach tool. Learn prompt logic and secure a usable asset in the first 45 minutes.
The Blueprint (NotebookLM): Uploading past invoices and rate sheets to extract the exact math and pricing logic required for their custom bid tool.
The Engine (Claude Code/Netlify): Executing the blueprint. Directing Claude to build the actual bidding calculator logic based on their specific numbers. The invisible professionalism. Setting up environment variables and deploying the serverless function so their API keys are locked in a vault, not exposed in the code.
The Front Door (Stitch): Forcing the AI to lock in typography, hex codes, and visual rules to prevent endless design tweaking. Assembling the animated, high-end proposal page using the locked brand logic from the previous step.
Deployment & Integration (Netlify): Linking the secure Claude Code engine to the Stitch front-end, and putting the final, interactive proposal page live on the web.
Iteration & Scale: Closing the loop. Feed your new bespoke proposal URL back into the email generator from Session 1. How to package and productize these workflows.
We start on May 5th. Only ten photographers.
This is an example of the proposal kicked out by my bid tool, and coded as a web page for a client. This (below) versus a boring PDF.
It took 1 minute for this page to be created, and one minute for it to be live for my client. Want to learn how? Take the class.
You will be able to use all free AI tools, but you will have to have a Pro account at Claude ($20 per month) to secure an API key.)
Just imagine the possibilities…
Two classes on the horizon:
Build with AI
Learn how to vibe code apps (like above), landing pages, and more. This class will make you familiar with what is happening in AI hands on. We build together, and you will be able to scale this knowledge into working with AI tools more efficiently.
Commercial Photography Side Hustle. (Plus OBBL)
A very successful class. This time, we are including the “One Big Beautiful Light” course with it. They go hand in hand, so I blended it in. Lighting and making money… two things I love to do.
If you’re over 40 and still hungry to make, build, and create, stick around. This space is for people who aren’t done yet (and never will be). I’ve got five decades of wins, failures, comebacks, and creative battles under my belt, and I’m sharing everything that still works—and burning the rest.
No fluff.
No hustle porn.
Just real tools for building a creative life on your own damn terms.
My Personal Website
My Photography Website.
Me on Medium.
Premium Members:
NotebookLM is the sleeper hit of the AI world. Because it only “knows” what you feed it, it eliminates the hallucination problem that plagues other LLMs. It is not a search engine; it is a localized intelligence multiplier.
Here are five direct, actionable ways photographers can use NotebookLM to drive revenue and eliminate operational friction.
All of these can be done with the free version of Notebook LM.
