Here’s the short version: instead of guessing which photography terms or art styles to jam into Midjourney, you ask the LLM to write a 200-word technical brief first. That brief becomes your prompt, and you paste it straight into your image tool. The idea comes from u/Significant-Strike40 over on r/PromptEngineering, who calls this the “Recursive Prompt.”
The Problem It Solves
Most people approach image generation backwards. They think of a concept, like “a cyberpunk city at night,” and then try to manually add technical details they half-remember seeing in someone else’s viral post. The result is usually fine, rarely great.
Fine means the image looks roughly like what you described. Rarely great means it doesn’t look like what you actually imagined. That gap exists because vague language produces average outputs. The model interpolates from thousands of similar images rather than rendering your specific vision.
The issue is that you’re asking yourself to speak the language of a cinematographer, lighting designer, and art director simultaneously. You’re not any of those things. But your LLM basically is.
It’s been trained on photography handbooks, cinematography blogs, art theory, and thousands of prompt engineering threads. That vocabulary is sitting there, ready to use. You just need to ask for it the right way.
How It Works
The technique has one step: ask your LLM to describe your concept in technical image-generation language before you ever open Midjourney.
The original poster’s framework covers three core elements:
- 🔦 Lighting: specific terms like “subsurface scattering,” “volumetric rays,” or “Rembrandt lighting”
- Camera lens: focal length and aperture settings like “35mm f/1.8” or “85mm f/2.8 bokeh”
- Artistic style: movements or aesthetics like “hyper-maximalism,” “brutalist,” or “Zdzislaw Beksinski”
The LLM produces a 200-word description that hits all three. You paste that description into your image tool. The LLM did the prep work; you get the image.
Why It Actually Works
Diffusion models like Midjourney respond to precise technical language, not vague concepts. “Soft lighting” lands somewhere. “Kino Flo with diffusion gel at 4800K” lands exactly where you want.
The “recursive” part is what makes the technique clever. You’re using one AI to write the input for another AI. The first AI (your LLM) translates a concept into technical language. The second AI (your image generator) translates that technical language into a visual. Each step does what it’s actually good at.
There’s no guessing, no Googling “best Midjourney photography terms,” no copy-pasting prompts from Twitter. You describe what you want, the LLM builds the brief, and the image model executes it.
Use Cases
- Product visuals: describe the object and surface, let the LLM specify the lighting ratios and lens compression that product photographers actually use
- Concept art: describe a character or scene from your story, the LLM pulls in relevant artistic movements and rendering styles you might not have known to search for
- Brand imagery: if you know your brand’s vibe but not the technical terms, this bridges the gap in under a minute
- Style testing: run the same concept through “hyper-maximalism” vs. “Japanese minimalism” to compare outputs side by side
📌 Prompt of the Day
Here is the original prompt from the post, reproduced exactly as the author shared it. Replace only the concept in brackets:
“I want an image of [Concept]. Write a 200-word technical description including lighting (e.g., ‘subsurface scattering’), camera lens (e.g., ’35mm f/1.8′), and artistic style (e.g., ‘hyper-maximalism’).”
That’s it. Run it through Claude, ChatGPT, or any capable LLM, and paste the output into your image tool. The examples in parentheses are just anchors to get the LLM thinking in the right vocabulary. You don’t need to change them, and you don’t need prior knowledge of what the terms mean. The LLM handles the translation; you just supply the concept.
Two Variations Worth Trying
The original prompt works well as-is. Here are a couple of ways to push it further.
First, add an emotional mood parameter. Something like: “Include lighting, camera lens, artistic style, and the emotional mood it should evoke.” This matters when you’re working on editorial or atmospheric images where the feeling carries as much weight as the technical setup.
Second, specify the model you’re using. Telling the LLM “write this for Midjourney v6” or “write this for Stable Diffusion XL” prompts it to tailor terminology to what actually performs well in that tool’s language. Small tweak, noticeable difference in output quality.
Third, ask for three variations at once. Add “give me three versions: one photorealistic, one painterly, one abstract” to the original prompt. You get three distinct technical briefs from a single LLM call. Run all three through your image tool and pick the direction you want to develop. This is especially useful early in a project when you haven’t committed to a visual style yet.
Go Deeper
If you want to see how other r/PromptEngineering members are adapting this technique, the original thread is worth checking out. It’s a short post with a focused idea, exactly the kind of thing that gets buried fast without someone pulling it into the open.
The ‘Recursive Prompt’ for Perfect Image Generation.
by u/Significant-Strike40 in PromptEngineering