Ditch These Pointless Midjourney Photography Terms

Don't waste time with camera settings. Here's how to get the photos you want instead.

If you know one thing about me, it’s that I haunt your inbox every Thursday and Sunday.

If you know two things about me, it’s that I prefer the “less is more” approach to prompting in general and image prompting in particular.

To wit:

Minimum Viable Prompt: Your Cure for AI Overwhelm

I’ve already talked about my dislike of “splatterprompting”—filling your image prompts with dozens of dubious descriptors.

But today I want to look more closely at using Midjourney and other image tools to create photographic images.

That’s right, you got it! Who’s a good AI boy? You are!

For a long time now, I’ve been coming across prompts that use specific camera names and settings in the hope of achieving the desired effect. Stuff like this:

Professional hyper-realistic photo of a man, shot on [CAMERA BRAND + MODEL] at [FOCAL LENGTH] and [F-STOP] on [ISO SETTING].

Here’s the thing though: Midjourney is not actually a camera.

(I’ll give you a moment to process this shocking revelation.)

You can’t turn tiny knobs on it to precisely adjust the focus, ISO settings,…