Reflections on Photography and Nano Banana Pro

2025-11-27

I couldn't resist. The internet has been absolutely screaming about Google’s new Nano Banana Pro. My feed was a 50/50 split between people hyping it up as the second coming of digital creation and others spiraling into existential dread about the end of "truth" in photographic evidence. Naturally, I had to try the new shiny toy, I had to indulge.

I went into it with a mix of high hopes and low-key anxiety. The idea that I’m giving Google a picture of myself voluntarily and the fact that we can just speak an image into existence is objectively wild. So, I decided to test the limits. I wanted to see if it could take a regular picture of me and turn it into something... well, cooler.

Here is the setup.

The Reference Picture:



The Prompt:

generate a picture of me, i am 5'8 and 80Kg with lightly toned, the picture is a full body shot at a very slightly low angle where i'm wearing boots, dark denims, a white tank top, a very big and fluffy fur coat that I'm wearing like a cape (arms not in), and I have my hands crossed, confident pose. I am wearing a military cadet style cap with an embroidered red star in the middle and smaller embroidered palestenian flag next to it. The hat is slanted slightly forward so it covers my eyes. I am smiling. I have silver hoop earrings. Background can be whatever keep it simple. Style is similar style to jack bridgland, High quality portrait, camera and lighting.

I hit generate. The little AI hamsters started spinning their wheels. And then... this popped out.

The Result:



GAGGED! And lowkey Embarrassed of my own prompt. However, I have genuinely never looked cooler in my entire life. I should've added grillz to the prompt. I stared at this picture for a solid five minutes. It was shocking. It wasn’t just a filter; it was a complete translation of a fantasy I had in my head directly into reality, using nothing but natural language. I felt like a wizard. A very vain wizard.

But then the dopamine hit wore off, and the questions started creeping in.

While I was generating a picture of this beautiful guy, I was weirdly conscious of the invisible costs. I know these massive AI models gulp down water and electricity like crazy. Gemini didn't give me a receipt for the footprint of my cool jacket pic, but I know it’s significantly higher than just Googling a recipe for banana bread. It felt a bit like burning a tire to light a cigarette, it’s bad for the world, but maaaan, look at that vibe.

And what does this mean for photography?

I mean don’t think AI is replacing photographers. In terms of raw skill, eye for composition, and the human talent of working with a subject, real photographers are leagues ahead of me typing words into a box.

But the control this gives you is terrifying. I don't need to wait for "golden hour" or rent expensive lights. I can just demand specific lighting, a precise setting, and a mood, and the machine obeys. It makes me wonder about photography as an art medium. Until now, its power has been its ability to capture events--to immortalize a moment that actually existed in time and space. Photography was proof. "Pics or it didn't happen," right?

Well, now we have the pics, and it definitely didn't happen.

That bond between photography and reality is officially severed. And that worries me, but if you want to get properly scared, go read Simulacra and Simulation.



Beaudrillard talked about the Hyperreal, a state where we can no longer distinguish between reality and a simulation of reality. He argued that eventually, the map would become more important than the territory it represents.

But this? This is Stage 4: Pure Simulacrum.

This image of me has no relation to any reality whatsoever. The alley doesn't exist. The lighting never happened. The jacket isn't in my closet. It is a copy of a copy of a copy, an amalgamation generated by a model trained on millions of other images.

He warned us that when the simulation becomes perfect, reality starts to rot. Why would I want to go outside, when I can generate the Platonic ideal of anything from my couch? and if I can make myself look like this, what else are people making? I read somewhere--and I forget where, probably doom-scrolling -- that 80-90% of the usages for these open-ended image models is porn.

It’s sickening. Some weird fuck could take a totally innocent picture of someone without their consent like a coworker, an ex, a random person on the street and feed it into a machine to put them in any compromising situation they wish. The potential for deepfake revenge porn and non-consensual imagery is an ethical nightmare that I don't think we are even remotely prepared for.

It’s a weird time to be alive. We’re holding technology that feels like magic, oscillating between "Wow, look what I made!" and "Oh god, what have we done?"

Maybe this is photography's "painting moment." When the camera was invented, painters freaked out because photorealism was suddenly cheap. But that pressure is exactly what saved art. It gave us Impressionism, Cubism, and the whole Modern art movement. Painting had to evolve away from just capturing reality.

I’m looking forward to seeing where actual photographers take their craft now that "capturing reality" is no longer their exclusive domain. They’ll have to lean into the things the AI can’t fake: the raw, the ugly, the unplanned, the distinctively human mistakes. We might see a move toward gritty, unpolished, hyper-subjective photography, images that force you to feel something and I’m here for it.

Also, If I can generate a high-fashion image of myself in some alleyway for the cost of a few watts of electricity, what does that mean for the guy who used to get paid $5,000 a day to shoot that?

Commercial photography is staring down the barrel of a gun. Marketing (8th deadly sin) is going to be the first industry to cut the cord. Companies are soulless efficiency machines. They don't care about the "art" of the ad campaign. Why fly a team to Kilimanjaro, hire models, rent gear, and pay for catering when an intern can just type "happy camper eating yogurt on a mountain, sunset, 8k" into Nano Banana Pro? If they can get that for a $20 monthly subscription instead of a $50k production budget, they will do it in a heartbeat.

We are entering an era of infinite, perfect content that nobody actually created, designed to sell us stuff we don't need, while the people who actually know how to light a scene are looking for new careers.

In the meantime, I did briefly wonder that if I sent it a nude, would it be able to make my dick look bigger? But let's be real, even super-intelligence has its limits.