911 All Things Interesting In Photography

The James Web Telescope is arguably the best camera.. not on the planet though. Chris looks at zoomable content, at being there and how that’s different from the limited senses that we can capture with our photography. Also: another quick look at DALL-E and what it has to do with pizza.

Topics:

  • [PHOTO, SPACE] IR: Areas of star formation : The James Webb Telescope sees more. This infrared image of spiral galaxy NGC 7496 shows the areas that were previously obscured by gas and dust to be star cradles.
  • [OTHER] Best camera : Ha! xkcd is perfectly right.. the best camera isn’t always the one you have on you. It might be the camera at L2.
  • [SPACE] Zoomable Image: Stephan’s Quintet : An impressive zoomable view of a JWST image of Stephan’s Quintet. Resolution 153 mega pixels.
  • [PHOTO] Being there : I had this txt discussion with my friend Jon Miller. It started with the new Insta360 One X2, meandered over to me planning to vlog the scouting tour next month with the iPhone only and ended up on a deeply philosophical level.
  • [PHOTO, AI] Vox: how dalle2 works and what it means : A great video by VOX talking about how image generators like DALL-E work. For a bonus treat, watch the bonus video mentioned in the video’s description.
  • [PHOTO, AI] PizzaDalle : A Twitter account showcasing DALL-E by generating pizza-related pictures. I like.

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910 Welcome to Dongle Town

Let’s talk about photo road trips, dongles, an exercise in spotting humanity, smartphones closing in on us, astrophotography and big satellite constellations. Plus: Where is TFTTF really located on the spectrum of photography podcasts?

Topics:

  • [OTHER] Welcome to Dongle Town : Chris has figured out an interesting way to vlog from his car with a multi-camera view and excellent sound. All while spending zero money and using exactly one device: his iPhone (plus a cheap lav mic)
  • [HOUSEKEEPING] It’s the Periphery
  • [PHOTO, AI] Exercise: This Image Does Not Exist : Can you tell if an image was generated by a human or a machine? The average score is 18.
  • [PHOTO] Foreground blur in portrait photos : Small but interesting change for the iPhone cameras when iOS 16 is out. Bokeh in front of the subject will now be rendered. One step further into the realm of the bigger sensors.
  • [SPACE] LEO constellations and astro photography : Lower Earth Orbit (LEO) is some 300 to 600 km above the Earth. With thousands of satellites, LEO is also one of the busiest areas outside of our planet. And Astronomers aren’t always happy about it. Chris talks with Meredith Rawls from the Vera C. Rubin observatory about what the new satellite constellations mean for space observation.

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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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