Category: Tips from the Top Floor

909 Generator Chris

Chris has now received the magical tool to generate photography out of thin air. But OpenAi’s DALL-E 2 is turning out to be quite a learning curve that is very different from actual photography.

Topics:

  • [PHOTO, AI] I’m a Generator : I finally got access to DALL-E 2, OpenAi’s image generator. And boy is it fun. I’m slowly building new neural pathways trying to come up with good prompts. Making progress. Weird is cool. Regular is hard. Faces are difficult. And sometimes they come out weird. I’ll talk about face fixers another time.
  • [AI, PHOTO] Re-Learning Skills : The way my art brain works makes it surprisingly difficult to come up with prompts that create something good. Seems a new tool isn’t the be-all end-all. Who would’ve though after several decades of photography… oh well. It’s a mix of learning a new tool and changing my brain structure to think differently about photography.
  • [AI] Semantic Segmentation : Scientists are working on algorithms to assign a label to every pixel in the world, without human supervision. How does that affect photography? Guess what. Your smartphone does exactly that.
  • [PHOTO, AI] Cosmopolitan cover : Image Generators are going mainstream. This issue of Cosmopolitan has a DALL-E-2-generated cover.
  • [PHOTO, AI] Behind the Cosmopolitan Cover : Here’s the story of how the Cosmopolitan cover came to be. Turns out tools like DALL-E 2 do require quite some babysitting to produce the desired results.
  • [WORKSHOPS] Road Trip : Chris is thinking about a 10-day Eastern-Europe Photo Road Trip. Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Transylvania. Small groups (3 max) in a zippy EV. Any takers? Share your feedback!

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908 AI in Photography


AI is going to enrich our lives and at the same time it’ll pull the rug out from under some people’s legs. Let’s explore things.

Feedback? Reach Chris at [email protected], or follow @tfttfphoto on Twitter for show announcements.

Topics:

  • [PHOTO, AI] AI in Photography : What will the AI revolution do to your photography? Will it enrich your way to work or will it put you out of work?
  • [TOOL] Photopea : A surprisingly well-features browser-based photo editor.
  • [SPACE] Kineto Tracking Mount : Find out how SpaceX and others track their rockets in flight with 10,000 mm lenses.

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907 Peek-A-Boo

Hi, it’s Chris. Remember me? Photography Tips from the Top Floor is back and better than ever. I’ll still talk photography, but the show will also branch out into other topics here and there, where I discuss things from my other podcasts The Future of Photography and Happy Shooting as well as my German production CM MAGAZIN. Of course this goes both ways.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback. You can reach me at [email protected] (send voice recordings!), or follow @tfttfphoto on Twitter for show announcements. Thanks for listening, and I’m glad to be back!

Topics:

  • [OTHER] CM MAGAZIN : Chris started his (German) CM MAGAZIN in January 2020. Going forward, it will be one of the sources for some of the more nerdy TFTTF topics.
  • [PHOTO] Lensrentals AMA : A fun AMA (ask me anything) by Lensrentals on Reddit. Watch out for the bear attack. Note: TFTTF is not affiliated with Lensrentals.
  • [NEWS] Leica & Panasonic: L squared : Leica and Panasonic have announced their new brand, “L² Technology.” Unfortunately, there isn’t much information in the press release. This isn’t really a new collaboration though, as together with Sigmar the two companies founded the “L Mount Alliance” in 2018.
  • [PHOTO] iOS 16 Photo Stuff : iOS 16 will make even more use of the phone’s cameras, including features like insect recognition and automatic subject cutout.

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