Tag: AI

913 Epic Episcope

As Chris is on his way to Transylvania (you can follow him on his vlog), he talks about face fixers, an amazing photo and headline combo, re-dubbing movies and if your job as a photographer is safe from our new A.I. overlords.

(Episode artwork: DALL-E 2)

Topics:

  • [NEWS] Scouting Eastern Europe : As you hear this episode, Chris is on his way to Transylvania, crossing Eastern European borders and exploring Prague, Budapest and places in Central Romania for the upcoming 2023 Eastern Europe Photo Road Trip. Follow along on the Scouting Tour Vlog.
  • [PHOTO, AI] Face Fixers : Generating photorealistic faces in DALL-E can be hit or miss. They generally look really good, but sometimes the eyes are a bit mismatched or misshapen. Face Fixers to the rescue.
  • [PHOTO] Autofokus : What a wonderful example of storytelling using photography. And meta levels involving the headline too. This photo shows a German politician who just had a bit of a scandal regarding his mingling with parts of the German auto industry, specifically the CEO of Porsche. So the German paper ZEIT ran a story about this scandal. So what did the photographer do? Focused on a car behind the politician, with really shallow depth of field. And then they titled the article “Auto-Fokus” – Simply brilliant!
  • [PHOTO, AI] The Champion re-dub : In some countries, movies in a non-native language are subtitled. In some they dub movies to the local language. Germany is one of those and while the majority of Germans seem to be just fine with it, some people (including Chris) find it quite jarring because either lip-sync isn’t perfect, the voice doesn’t fit the actor or the voice performance doesn’t feel right. Here’s a new (and a bit mind-blowing) AI-based method that solves at least the lip-sync issue.
  • [AI] Tipping Points – Ash Jafari : Since DALL-E can now be used commercially, and as it’s improving, you will see more and more businesses wonder if they want to a) pay a graphic designer or photographer for 3 hours of work or b) write a prompt, iterate a couple of times and end up with a good enough result for their purposes. Within minutes and for just a few dollars. Ash Jafari makes the convincing point that we will see those tipping points sooner rather than later.
  • [COOL] Episcope Lens : Back in the 90s, the small-sensor DV cameras had the issue that all small-sensor cameras have: too much depth of field. There were several adapters on the market that allowed 35mm lenses to be used on DV cameras by means of projection. Here’s a DIY project that does the same but on a totally new level.

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912 The Locksmith’s Paradox

What do locksmiths have to do with photography? How about expoplanets? Find out on today’s episode.

(Episode artwork: DALL-E 2)

Topics:

  • [TOOL] SD Recovery : An amazing look at the technology that is used in data recovery to read a broken SD card.
  • [SPACE, PHOTO] Finding Exo Planets : Finding exoplanets has everything to do with the tech that we have in our cameras. The methods used to find if a star millions or billions of light years away has a habitable planet orbiting around it, use camera sensors to measure differences in brightness, motion and to measure changes in the spectrum of light coming from that star. And it’s fascinating.
  • [PHOTO] The Locksmith’s Paradox : There’s this paradox in which your work gets valued less the more experience you have. You can see that in photography every day.
  • [PHOTO, AI] The Stock Problem : An article headline at a big publication is hardly ever chosen by the person who wrote the article, but by someone (or by an A.I.) who specializes on maximizing clicks. We see the same issue with stock photos that are served in social media posts.

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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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