Couldn’t agree more on everything. Writers don’t need to be photographers, but’s it’s a reality that they need to put more than two seconds of effort into a header image. You can kind of tell when a writer types in the first search term they could think of into a stock photo site and grabbed the top image (and I tend to avoid those articles because it sends a certain signal).

I’m a huge proponent of creating your own image as much as possible, and even with AI art it’s easier than ever to make something fun or different pretty quickly.