Maya Osei has been shooting commercial work out of Pilsen for about six years. She started on a Fuji X-T3, moved to medium format when she landed a run of editorial clients, and has watched the photography market do things nobody predicted. When AI image generation scaled up in 2023, a lot of photographers she knew panicked. Maya did not. She raised her rates. I wanted to know why, and what she learned from watching what happened next.
Let's start with the obvious question. AI generates millions of images a day now. How are you still busy?
Because busy isn't the right metric anymore. I was busy before AI too, doing $400 product shoots for brands that just needed something that looked fine. That work is genuinely gone. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But the work that required me... someone who shows up, who understands the light in a specific room on a specific afternoon, who can direct a subject into a real expression instead of a generated one... that work didn't disappear. It got scarce relative to everything else. Scarcity does something interesting to price. I raised my day rate by 40% in 2024. I lost maybe three clients who weren't going to pay anyway. I gained five who were specifically looking for a human photographer because they'd already tried the AI route and it didn't do what they needed.
What didn't it do?
The truth is, AI images look like AI images now. There's a texture to them. A kind of... perfection that reads as empty. I had a brand director tell me she could get a thousand product images generated for $200, and she did. And her engagement dropped. Not because people figured out they were AI, but because there was nothing to feel inside them. Nobody made a choice. Nobody stood in a particular spot because the shadow fell a certain way. The audience felt that absence without being able to name it. When she came back and hired me, she said, quote, I need someone who was actually there. That sentence has become the whole business case for what I do.
So you're selling presence. Not images.
Exactly. I'm selling proof that a human being was in the room making decisions. And in a world where that's increasingly optional, it's also increasingly meaningful when it happens. Think about what's changed: before AI, every image implied a human was there. That was the default. Now it isn't. So now when a human is there, it means something. It signals intention. It signals investment. The brands that understand that... they're the ones who can still build emotional relationships with their audiences. The ones who went full AI for cost savings... most of them are seeing their visual identity flatten out. They all start to look like each other because they're all pulling from the same aesthetic pool.
How did you decide on the 40% rate increase? Was that research, or instinct?
Honestly? Both. I looked at what editorial photographers in New York and London were charging for similar work, which I'd always been undercutting because I was in Chicago and told myself I had to. That was a lie I'd been telling myself. Pilsen is not a discount. The creative scene here is serious. The clients are serious. I just had imposter syndrome dressed up as market research. The AI flood was actually clarifying. When I could point to data showing that authentic human work was commanding premiums... that the stock image market collapsed in volume but the commissioned photography market held... I had a real argument to make. To myself first, then to clients.
Nobody tells you this but... what's the part of this shift most photographers are missing?
That the conversation with the client changed. Before, you were competing on output. Here are my images, here are their images, compare. Now you're competing on process. The client wants to know how you work, who you are, why you care about this specific project. My consultations take twice as long as they used to. And that's not inefficiency... that's the product. I'm building trust that an algorithm can't manufacture. The photographers who are struggling are the ones still trying to win on portfolio quality alone. Your portfolio is table stakes. Your personality, your point of view, your ability to walk into a room and make something real happen... that's what they're buying. You have to sell that now. A lot of photographers don't know how to sell that because nobody ever told them to.
What does positioning actually look like in practice for you?
I narrowed down. I stopped being available for everything. I don't shoot events anymore. I don't do headshots unless they're part of a bigger brand project. I focus on food, interiors, and brand editorial work for independent businesses. That specificity lets me say things like: I understand the light in Logan Square restaurants because I've shot forty of them. I know what makes a small business feel aspirational without feeling dishonest. That's real. Nobody can generate that expertise. I have a four-line bio now that says exactly what I do and who I do it for. The inquiries I get now are from people who already want me specifically. The sales conversation is almost nothing. That's the value of narrow positioning in a flooded market... you stop being findable by everyone and start being findable by the right people.
If you could say one thing to a photographer who's watching their stock image income disappear and doesn't know what to do next?
The stock market is gone. I know that's brutal to hear. But stock was already a bad long-term play because it commodified the thing you're best at. What you have that no model has is a body, a history, a perspective. You've been in rooms. You've felt tension between people and caught it on a sensor. You know the difference between a moment that's staged and one that's real because you were there when it happened. That knowledge doesn't compress into a training set. Stop trying to compete with infinite generation. Start charging for what infinite generation can never provide: the fact that you were actually present. LUNARI has been helping a lot of photographers I know build the kind of positioning pages and client content that communicates exactly that... your process, your presence, your point of view... in a way that doesn't feel like a resume. That's the infrastructure worth building right now. The rest of it... just show up and be undeniably human. That is the whole strategy.