∞ Blog ∞
On Photography, Art, And The Creative Life
Welcome to the place affectionately known as my "writings on the walls", where you will find images, thoughts, and discussions on Photography, Art, and The Creative Life... or so I'm told.
Who’s Afraid Of The A.I. Wolf?
Fear is a powerful thing, and it has a useful purpose in our survival. That said, it can best be utilized as a guide, and not a paralyzing emotion. So who is afraid of the potential of A.I. technology? Lots of very prominent folks in the tech industry are sounding alarms 🚨, but it may be surprising that Adobe, the developers of their own A.I. tool...
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A.I.? D.I.Y.!
When it comes to creating (*generating) images using Artificial Intelligence tools, I ask students (really any photographers), can you do that without A.I.? Do you have the requisite skills and know-how to create these same images on your own? If not, then maybe you’re not the artist you think you are. If your first response is “No I’m not that’s w...
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A.I. and Ethics
Are there any moral or ethical considerations to be calculated when using Artificial Intelligence to “create” Art (or is “generate” a better term)? This makes me wonder if ethics are taught in school anymore?
So what does ethics have to do with using A.I. tools to create images or art? Well, when the tool is doing what has been termed “scraping” t...
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A.I. and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
So what is all the uproar about Artificial Intelligence and the creation of images/artwork? I have a few thoughts 💭… Now let me say I have not personally interacted directly with any A.I. program targeting the creative image making field (i.e. Photography.) I have however watched a number of demos of some of the newer iterations like Adobe’s “Gene...
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It’s the LUT Life for Me!
A while back I did a video tutorial on how I create LUTs using Affinity Photo to color grade images and import them into my desktop 🖥️ program Exposure X5. Because Exposure X5 (and later versions) is one of the only image post-processing apps that has a well developed, robust and dedicated LUTs tool, it has been where I’ve chosen to utilize this p...
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One Lens to Rule Them All!
Now let me start by saying I am NOT by any stretch an optics engineer, nor do I fully understand the physics of lens creation. I certainly don’t know what Apple engineers know about creating lenses for iPhones and the technology associated with the chip sensors and neural goodness they employ to go with their lenses. That said, I can’t help but won...
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I’m A Skipper
I am a “Skipper”. No, not the boat kind, I skip software versions, and hardware upgrades on a regular basis (but not every time 😉.) Coming up in the analog photography days, it was easy to see the camera as just a “film holder” with a lens. Choosing a camera system was more about choosing the best glass for the best image quality, and that’s why N...
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How I Did It :: Used Film Post 1
This is the first in a series of 11 blogposts in the “Used Film” series describing the thought processes, creative decisions, and analog process of creating these images using film 🎞, both Polaroid and sheet film. So much of these processes, figuring out how to create the looks and effects, felt very much like being Victor Frankenstein and piecing...
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How I Did It :: Used Film Post 2
This image of a ram’s skull was fairly simple to photograph, it was in the “processing” that the qualities really brought about its magical potential. First, the rigging: I draped a large black velvet cloth backdrop that I cut an X slit in the middle of. Next I rigged a stand behind the velvet with a pole sticking through the X and mounted the skul...
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How I Did It :: Used Film Post 3
If you are following this Used Film series in order, you’ll recognize the technique I used to get this second ram’s skull image. This particular image above is actually only technically the third step in the process and not the final image (it contains the negative image of the skull, plus the negative image of the paper background itself, both “sa...
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