Editing and AI

Nikon D810, 80-400mm, 1/200, f4.5, ISO 12,800

The debate about artificial intelligence in photo editing is far from over. At what point does a photo stop being a photo and become an AI creation? Though I don’t hope to definitively answer the question here, I can at least provide a sample from the borderland.

I took the photo above during yesterday’s Central Avenue Dia de los Muertos parade. If you click on it to get a better view of the details, you’ll see just how grainy it is. That’s an inevitable consequence of cranking the ISO way up, which in turn is an inevitable consequence of working in low light (a nearby streetlight was the best I could find) without flash (too far away from the subjects for the flash to be of much use).

So when I got it home and loaded it into Lightroom, I ran a noise reduction filter on the image. Interestingly enough, the app made a copy of the original and then officially designated the filtered version as “Enhanced-NR” indicating that it had been altered using AI.

As ever, my goal is for the image to reproduce the experience, to show what I saw. The grainy photo definitely wasn’t what I was after. The noise-reduced version is a lot closer to reality.

But here’s the issue: it has also taken on an AI-view-of-the-world visual quality. If you typed “woman celebrating Dia de los Muertos” into a generative AI system, you’d likely get something more surreal than this. Still, that same sense of light and color that algorithms bring to their own products ... well, that’s what this looks like, too. 

And the last thing I’d ever want as a photographer would be an image that looked like a machine made it up.

HDR blast from the past

When digging through some old files, I ran across these photos from a classroom exercise many, many years ago. The picture above is the HDR combination of the photos below.

In fairness to Photoshop, the combo might have been a little better if the source images weren’t old, relatively low quality JPEGs.

Gather ye photos while ye may

Nikon D810, 35mm (18-35), 1/100, f/7.1, ISO 200, Filtered

A recent experience brought me mindful of one of the most important rules of photography: if you see something worth shooting, shoot it. If you have any way to take the picture, take it. Never think “oh, that thing will still be there tomorrow. I can photograph it then when I have a better camera and I have the time and so many other excuses to not do it now.”

You might be right. But then again, you might be wrong.

I noticed this gutted, flat-tired trailer abandoned beside the road along the route I take to and from work every day. I admit I didn’t photograph it the first time I saw it. Or the second. Or even the third. But it was obviously worth a picture, and the fear that it would be torched or towed away started to nag at me.

Two days after I got my shot, the trailer vanished.

The second photo in this post is a picture of the torn-down remains of a house with nothing left standing except a fireplace and a built-in bookshelf. And the third photo is a picture of a semi trailer tipped over by the side of the road, its cargo of large, white spheres spread all over the ground.

The reason you aren’t able to see either of those photos is that I never shot them. I saw opportunities for photos, but I had other priorities. And when I came back, they were gone.

In my partial defense, both of these opportunities presented themselves back in the days before phones with cameras (and in the case of the chimney, even before digital cameras). But now we should all find it much harder to not take pictures when we can.

This too was a transient roadside find: a car that had been incinerated and abandoned along the same stretch of road as the trailer. And again it was gone the day after I took pictures of it.

Long-time residents of eastern Wyandotte County may remember the Tower Plaza strip mall, named after the water tower that stood above the stores. In 2016 it met its demise. I took pictures of it before the dismantling began, but the mid-process photos were more interesting. Added bonus: the tower had a Hollywood Video logo painted on its side.

Best of the 365 Blog – January 2019

Nikon D810, 105mm (28-105), 1/500, f/4.5, ISO 800

The new year began as usual with our annual trip to Kaufman Stadium to wish the Royals luck in the coming summer. The scattered glitter behind the medallion created an interesting halo effect.

Nikon D810, 1/100, f/4.5, ISO 800

 This month we’re fostering two kittens. As a group they’re called The Wonder Twins. This one is Rudy.

iPhone 7

 And this one is Max.

 

Nikon D810, 105mm (28-105), 1/60, f/10, ISO 200

 Driving down Washington Boulevard not far from my house, I noticed a branch stuck on a power line. It made an interesting series of images.

iPhone 7, cropped and filtered

Back at the college for pre-semester inservice. The actual weather was almost as gloomy as this black and white filter job implies.

Nikon D810, 90mm (28-105), 1/100, f/8, ISO 400

A long time ago we had a Christmas tree on the back deck. Its tree topper was a sun face, at least until the ornament fell off and broke. Its pieces are still lurking about the deck. Frame ...

Nikon D810, 105mm (28-105), 1/800, f/4.5, ISO 400

... and face.

Nikon D810, 21mm (18-35), 1/320, f/16, ISO 400

I needed a symmetrical landscape for a 52-week challenge I’m working on. I also needed some shot composition examples for the weekly exercise in my photography class. As the flags indicate, it was extremely windy. And very cold. I actually had to give up before I got everything I was after.

Kittens (lighting from the side)

Nikon 810, 105mm (28-105), 1/60, f/4.5, ISO 2500

This summer we fostered a set of six kittens, taking care of them until they could get spots at the Lawrence Humane Society. The day before they left us for the next step on their journey, we let them run around loose in the bedroom for awhile. I set up a pair of small continuous lights rather than use a strobe (thinking the flashing might spook them). Because the lights were near the same height as the kittens, the result was classic side lighting.

Side-lighting can produce different effects based on the positioning of the light and the subject. The photo above is a classic side light (with the source itself in the frame). On the other hand, in the photo below the subject is lit from the front by both lights. It isn’t quite the same as an overhead source, but it isn’t as dramatic as the first photo.

Nikon 810, 105mm (28-105), 1/100, f/4.5, ISO 6400

Nor is it as dramatic as a side light from behind. This little guy was constantly on the go, and the combination of back light, body posture and motion blur captured his personality well.

Nikon 810, 98mm (28-105), 1/100, f/4.5, ISO 6400

Best of the 365 Blog – June 2018

This “best of” is going to be shorter than usual. Early in June I decided to suspend the 365 project for a little while. I had some other things going on in my life and just generally needed a break.

Nikon 810, 500mm (150-500), 1/200, f/6.3, ISO 400

In this photo you can see one of the “I need some time off” factors. Two of the outdoor cats had kittens, and we decided to rescue them rather than have a handful of cats become a growing colony. This the first time that I saw them out of their hiding place long enough for me to go grab a camera.

Nikon 810, 8mm, 1/80, f/13, ISO 2000

My friend Ken likes to go to the Combat Air Museum in Topeka as a palette cleanser at the end of every school year. I tagged along this time so I could use the 810 to redo some of the pictures I’d taken there in the past with equipment with lower dynamic ranges.

Nikon 3000, 55mm (18-55), 1/125, f/5.6, ISO 110

Seizing the kittens proved to be more complicated than we first expected. They managed to get in under the deck steps where we couldn’t reach them. Knowing that their moms would move them if we didn’t get them all at once, I used a crowbar to pry up some of the boards so we could get at them. Everyone was successfully rescued.

Nikon 810, 28mm (28-105), 1/125, f/13, ISO 100

For one of the last photos I took before taking a break, I went to the Kansas City Kansas Public Library’s food truck day. Which turned out to be one food truck. Still, it provided some good photo ops.

Fireworks 2018

Nikon 810, 28mm (28-105), 2 sec., f/4.5, ISO 100

This year I thought I’d try something new for Fourth of July photos. A Petapixel article described a technique that produced puffy, flower-like images. My results differed, but I’m nonetheless pleased with what I got.

The trick was to set the shutter for long exposure (I went with a second or two), start with the lens completely out of focus and then snap to clear focus while the shutter was still open. The result is an image that’s partially in focus and partially out. It ended up creating an illusion of depth of field, which altered the perceived size of the subject (kinda like the tilt shift technique).

Our eyes work in ways quite similar to our camera lenses. So we're used to a more or less infinite depth of field for subjects at a distance but a narrower field for things that are close to our faces. That's why the part-in-part-out focus of the fireworks photo creates the illusion that it's a smaller object closer up.

Nikon 810, 28mm (28-105), 2 sec., f/4.5, ISO 100

I also brought the wrong tripod (going with the heavy one for stability but forgetting that it can be kind of a pain to point up at any angle greater than 60 degrees or so). So several of my sky burst photos were hand held, producing another interesting effect even when I wasn’t changing the focus mid-shot.

Nikon 810, 28mm (28-105), 2 sec., f/4.5, ISO 100