I Don’t Know What to Shoot!

I often have periods of time where I am struggling to know what to shoot. I think that in the Lake District, it is hard to make a decision about what to shoot as there is so much of it to cover, the weather is so changeable (apart from when we’re having another heatwave, though it’s the middle of August 2026 and it’s actually raining as I write this!), but the same can be said of any style of photography and in any location. It probably won’t surprise you to know that I had a similar experience when I lived in London.

I think at times, my problem is that a lot of the time, I need to have some kind of plan of what I am doing to shoot. I have a nature reserve within walking distance of my home, so that’s a great place to go and shoot textures or patterns, I don’t live far from an elevated view point which is only a short (but very steep) walk up a hill and is great for sunrise.

But sometimes, I need to be challenged and I need something to get me off my backside and out into the world, even if it’s just in the garden.

To help with this, I have used my very (incredibly) basic knowledge of coding along with the much quicker and much more thorough knowledge of a chatbot to create something to help me with this.

What I have built (with the help of AI), is something you can use to help come up with some ‘challenges’ that I hope will inspire you to get out shooting.

It’s really basic and very easy to use.

All you need to do is choose from some of the options (the greatest number of decisions you need to make is only ever one and that’s to select which type of photography you want to do). and then hit the button which says “give me something to shoot” and the app will generate you an idea with some different parameters to go and have a go at. It’s that simple!

There is a range of styles to choose from.

If you want to shoot at a specific time of the day, then you can tell it that, you can specify a broad type of location, how much time you have and what kit you want to use. Doing this can help you make it really specific.

For those of you who are like a surprise, guess what… there’s a surprise me button. Surprise!

I will point out, that this is very much a first draft of what I am trying to achieve, which is something that the photography community can get meaningful use out of. Please help me to test it, let me know what you think and what else you would like to see in future iterations of this. I would like to try and gamify it a bit and potentially introduce competitions and a space for you to share the work that you have created as a result of using this little piece of software.

Because it’s a first draft, I haven’t put a ton of different scenarios into it, so if you keep hitting the surprise me button, you will see repetition quite quickly, this is deliberate as I don’t want to spend a bunch of time working on this if it isn’t going to be used widely. If it takes off, I will add more to it in due course.

If you have any feedback or would like to make a suggestion then please click the button below to send me an email.

I am also very aware of the fact this is something which is AI made, with some human input and that there is a lot of debate around the use of AI in photography at the moment. If this is something which is well used and I intend to develop it further then I will of course bring someone on board who is suitably qualified to help me to do this and do it properly. This is just a proof of concept at the moment!