you do not lack ideas.
you lack clarity.

I have spent my whole working life around images. I started on set as a model, in love with the energy of a team. Then I studied graphic design and built brands and websites, learning how image, type and colour work together. After that came retouching: years alone behind a desk, learning how light falls on skin and how one small correction can change a whole face. I picked up the camera to find that collaboration again, and for a while it felt like I had found my place.

Then AI arrived, and that place began to shrink. Retouching I had spent years mastering could suddenly be done in minutes instead of hours. Now I feel photography shifting too, as clients start generating images instead of booking a shoot. It is a lonely thing to watch your craft change under your hands, with nobody to remind you of your worth.

So I decided to turn it around. Instead of frustration, I chose fun, and started to play with the infinite possibilities. Along the way I realised that nothing I learned was wasted: the eye for composition from design, the patience of retouching, the feel for light and directing from my years on set. That is exactly what makes an AI image good. All images in this deck are AI, directed, shaped and reshaped until they carried the style you would recognise as mine.

It also let me create pictures I had been dreaming about for years. I grew up surrounded by animals, from rabbits and rats to horses and even stick insects, but I could never safely put a model beside a cheetah, a crocodile or a hippo. Now I could. And the animals turned out to be more than a picture. Freezing, hiding, circling, holding on: the patterns that keep us stuck are old instincts. When a rabbit freezes, nobody calls it weak. It is simply trying to stay safe. Seeing it that way makes it easier to be kind to yourself when you do the same.

This is the deck I could have used when my place in the world of images began to move. A voice to turn to on the days there is no one to ask. I hope it does the same for you.

Zilla van den Born · photographer · maker of The Thinking Deck