2027 is the year of authenticity.

With AI, social media, and everything online becoming more polished and perfect, I find myself wanting the opposite.

I want spontaneity. Unplanned photographs. Unscripted videos. Crooked lines. Distractions in the frame. Things that feel like the world actually looks when I’m walking through it.

There’s this conventional idea that a good photograph needs to be perfectly composed. Clean up the frame, eliminate distractions, follow the rule of thirds, make everything look intentional.

That doesn’t interest me as much anymore.

When I walk around Santa Monica, I see trees, power lines, buildings, cars, antennas, people, and stuff everywhere. Life isn’t perfectly composed. I want my photographs to reflect that.

It’s the same with these videos. I don’t want perfect lighting, a perfect script, or every mistake edited out. I want to leave in the stumbles and stupid things I say. I want it to feel like me.

Maybe that becomes more important as AI makes it easier to create things that are technically perfect.

I also like the idea of looking back at these videos 20 years from now. I’ll be 64, watching the 44-year-old version of myself walking around Santa Monica, taking photographs and figuring things out.

I don’t want to see some polished, cookie-cutter version of myself.

I want to see who I actually was.

So that’s what I’m going with for 2027: authenticity.

More photographs. More vlogging. Less perfection.