920 Death of a Workhorse

Chris brings you a bit of a different episode today because his main production machine has just died. Want to support? Go to tfttf.com/support

Topics:

  • [OTHER] Pellworm : We spent a week on Pellworm, a 37 square kilometer island located in the Wadden Sea. We’ve taken pictures too.
  • [COOL] Lost Places – Horror-Hospital … AI : Here’s one for spooky October. Someone has generated scenes from an urban exploration that never happened, in an old derelict hospital. Very eerie.
  • [FOLLOW-UP] : Cameras age, be it mechanical or the electronics. This is especially visible in the aging of the sensor of a digital camera. But there’s a reason you don’t really get to see it.

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919 And I Froze

Chris invites you into the world of building new neural pathways by talking about one of the biggest learning experiences he had in a long time. Also: how about using video tools to inspire some new photo editing tools?

Topics:

  • [AI, PHOTO] Greg Rutkowski : Fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski is not happy. His name shows up in a substantial number of AI art generation prompts to make the results more like his art style. While that made him much more known, it also means that it’s now fairly simple to create art that is inspired by his style.
  • [PHOTO, CREATIVITY] Coming from Video : Video production and editing has a few tools to offer that we could use in photography. A few have made their way into still photography already, such as LUTs for color grading and some cameras even offer zebra stripes to make manual exposure easier. But there are more that we haven’t really seen in still photography yet. One being video waveforms for judging exposure and node-based editors for more control over editing.
  • [PHOTO, CREATIVITY, AI] And I Froze… : Sitting in front of an empty text box can be a very daunting task. Chris talks about how his experience building the first prompts was very similar to that of AI god Andrei Karpathy and how he tries to cover both his caution regarding AI-induced societal changes and his excitement of building new brain pathways.

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918 Getty Bans AI

Chris is catching up on the latest developments in the world of camera makers (Nikon goes 3D printing?!), new papers (awesome noise reduction), a train set with 10 miles of tracks (and photography thereof) and of one big question to Getty: is it really just about copyright questions? Really?

Topics:

  • [PHOTO, NEWS] Nikon vor 620 Millionen Euro Übernahme : Nikon is planning take over SLM technologies, a German company that specializes on 3D printing. The 620 EUR acquisition seems to be going forward. Nikon going into modern manufacturing seems like an interesting move.
  • [AI, PHOTO] RawNeRF : Denoising technology has been developed to near perfection over the last 20+ years. From simple pixel averaging to more recent AI-based detail restoration techniques. Now a paper about RawNeRF (NeRF standing for Neural Radiance Fields) outlines a new technique that uses multiple photos to achieve some pretty stunning results.
  • [PHOTO] Miniatur Wunderland, Laowa und Cybertruck : Miniatur Wunderland is located in Hamburg, Germany. Not only is it a huge train set with over 10 miles of tracks, they also have moving cars, planes, landscapes and it’s become quite a visitor attraction. They are also the perfect use case for both versions of the Laowa probe lens.
  • [PHOTO, AI, NEWS] Getty bans AI art : This one is not really surprising. Getty Images being one of the biggest commercial photo agencies has now banned AI-generated art from their library. This includes StableDiffusion, DALL-E and of course Midjourney. They claim it’s because of unclear copyright, but Chris suspects something different to be real reason behind the decision.

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