I immersed myself in prompts, in generated worlds, in the boundless possibilities of simulation. But it was exactly that artificial world that made me value ordinary looking more. It brought me back to the essence of the camera.
Because imagination doesn't live in the tool. It lives in the gaze. You can generate magic behind a screen. But you can find that same magic simply by going out into the street. By wandering. By waiting until the shot presents itself, until those shots tell their own story in the edit.
I closed the year in Daugavpils, Latvia. Among the raw Soviet architecture I found a set that felt like a hallucination: red planets floating between concrete giants, a glowing moon tangled in the branches. It looks like science fiction, but it is tangible reality.
"I wonder whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again."
That line from Le Petit Prince stayed with me. Whether in 2026 I'm at my screen building a new world, or standing in the Baltic cold with my camera, the goal stays the same: finding that one image in which reality, for a moment, turns to poetry.
