You Look Like….

Posted on November 3, 2023 by Guthlac

I love capturing images with my phone but please don’t believe the hype when push comes to shove an iPhone really does have its limits.

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Damp Toes….

Posted on November 2, 2023 by Guthlac

So the plan was to get out and capture few images in the neighbourhood before Storm Ciaran arrived. The images were going to reflect the very damp nature of things at the moment and perhaps maybe also capture some rich decaying autumnal colour. That was the plan and to a degree it came together. Unfortunately, I also discovered the limitations of my new walking boots. It seems that no matter how waterproof your boots might be if you step in a puddle that is deeper than the top of the boots then your foot is going to get wet. I guess that’s physics for you!

So I had to beat a damp retreat (luckily it was only one foot) but still managed got some images.

Storm Ciaran is now having a good puff outside but nothing compared to what the winds are like along the south coast which thankfully is the our lot. We live just about as far as you can from the sea in Britain which usually removes some or most of the ferocity of any passing storm. So it rains but never too much; It snows but not too deep. The only problem being so far from the sea, by British standards, is that during the summer heat waves don’t have cooling breezes blowing in from the sea so can get a bit sticky.

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Young at Heart….

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Guthlac

There is a point where the World Wide Web just can’t do justice to an image and three of these image proves that point. They contain so much detail that you need to look at them really closely. Unfortunately that detail is not discernible in such small files even when I have given them just a bit more data.

All three images take in vistas from the top of western Charnwood hills. The first image is of the Trent Valley, the second of the Soar Valley and third is the view across to the Malvern Hills the other side of Birmingham.

The last image dosn’t suffer from such problems.

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Lamplight from your Window…

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Guthlac

Make the most whilst the sun is here. I was out this morning walking a very old road Fosse Way. It was first established back in the 50’s CE which means it is almost 2000 years old. There are some suggestions that the Romans may just have reused a much older trackway. I have no idea whether this is true but by any standards it is old.

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And the Walls Kept Tumbling Down…

Posted on October 28, 2023 by Guthlac

Standing at the top of the ridge upon which Knaptoft stands you did get a feeling that you are looking out on a very green and pleasant land. This is of course is true right upto the point it is not. It also appears that the whole of the Soar valley is wooded. Again, true in parts. What was very clear was that it was lovely autumnal afternoon and just for a moment it felt that everything was right with the world. Surely you can forgive me my small delusion.

Glen Williams

My partner in crime has been able to put a name to the artist I couldn’t find in my previous blog – Glen Williams. He does have a website but it clearly isn’t updated that much. If you want a better feel for his work, including a number of paintings that were exhibition at Huddersfield, then the better link is this.

I guess the reason I found the work so emotive was because it reminded me of the life I lead growing up in a pit (coal) village. Of course that way of life has now gone to be replaced by commuting into Birmingham. I know only visit the village occasionally and it just isn’t the same place. Life moves on and that is the story of the village which has been mining coal for the best part of two millenium, unlike many of the pit villages in West Yorkshire which sprung up because of a deep mine being sunk, and so has experience of moving on .

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Aging Rock Star…

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Guthlac

One of the many signs that age is catching up on you is when you visit a statue that memorialise something or someone from your formative period and you appear to be the only one who notices. Yesterday we visited Huddersfield to view the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2003 and whilst there I wanted to visit the Harold Wilson statue. It was a damp day which added to the cragy splendor of the statue and yet we were the only people paying any attention to a statue to one of the greats of 20th century British politics. The people walking by didn’t care and I suspect for many of them he meant nothing.

I won’t dwell on the exhibition we came to see at the Temporary Contemporary Gallery because my travelling companion David Manley will be more eloquent and informed in his review on his blog.

There was another small exhibition, well at least I think it was but I forgot to take a photo of the introduction so I can’t say for definite. I have tried to find out the name of the artist from the gallery website and well the site, such as it is, appalling with little or no information. This is such a shame but there we are.

Huddersfield town centre is really quite small but packed with excellent Victorian or Edwardian architecture. Unfortunately, it is a town that appears to have seen better times and whilst the local council is really trying its best the place does have sense of decline. It is no wonder that many of the so called ‘Red Wall‘ parliamentary constituencies are scattered around the area – central government has over the years slowly disemboweled local government and given them little or no chance of trying to make things better. Hopefully, things might improve should we get a change of government next year.

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All So Autumnal…

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Guthlac

So autumn is starting to catch up. The storms of the past few days appear to have blown the last embers of summer out and we are slowly cooling off, but not as quickly as we probably should do.

A nice afternoon found me meandering around the byways of Gartree once more. This is third of these projects I have undertaken and this one is the first where I have deployed the data I have at hand, the mapping facility in Lightroom, to try and map out where to go next. David, my erstwhile partner in crime, has also started to map out his canvases that will one day be the paintings inspired by our travels.

We humble photographers, in contrast, have to put in the hard physical miles to capture our images compared to painters inspirational travels – hence solo trips. (I know – what a hardship!)

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A VERY Smelly Ram…

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Guthlac

I guess at one level a Ram’s life is a very easy one. Eat, Breath and F**K. That would seem to be their lot. Most of the time they hang around with other rams being, well, rams. I came across this motty crew this afternoon whilst out and about. There clearly was only one leader and boy oh boy did he let everyone know. When I arrived at the gate he was some way off but as soon as he saw me he ran to the gate. However, his presence could be detected across the field… he stink!

Looking at the images now the Marvin comes into my mind. I have no idea where that came from but I have decided that this was Marvin, the stinky ram. Not sure anyone is going to write a children’s book about him.

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Last Post about AI Generated Content…for now

Posted on October 22, 2023 by Guthlac

I’ve now spent a day or so playing around with Adobe’s Generate Fill option and I think I have got a reasonable first impression on it what it can and cannot do. The first thing that I have discovered is that it is really good at generating content to fill an area (the name really gives that away!). The examples from the last two posts show how useful that can be.

The second lesson is that there are some clear ethical as well as copyright rules in what it will and will not generate. This is how it should be but I suspect there are AI generation software out there which has few if any of these rules written into their programming.

The third lesson is that once you start to push software away from ‘fill’ it can very quickly get itself into a mess or the results are worse than some basic cloning of a second image on.top of another. In the above image I asked it change the colour of the hat which it has made a reasonable stab at. It is far from perfect but with a bit of further work in Photoshop I’m sure I could make it look a lot better. However, the next three examples show the limits of the software. I asked for a Woolen hat, Baseball cap and a Fur Hat.

The best thing that can be said about the Baseball Cap generation is that it is period sensitive. Other than that it is not really that good.

So perhaps my concerns about fake photos causing problems by using the Adobe version of AI was, thankfully, a overblown. But I suspect the second or third iteration may well be significantly better at generating content. Also Adobe is a huge corporation so they will be very cautious about how they implement their AI generative software. This being said my YouTube feed is already getting videos on how to hack aspects of Generative Fill so now this software is out their how the software will develop is anyone’s guess.

For me I have no interest in changing the colour of some garment or change a jacket for a t shirt, yes it will do that. Instead I will continue to use the software for what I believe it is really good at, adding slices of background as and where I need it, to make the photo look a lot better as here.

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Fake Photo…or is it?

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Guthlac

The more I use the content generation in Adobe software the more it is blowing my wind. The above image is perfectly normal captured with perhaps a wide or super wide lens. Nothing to see here you might think. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Firstly the image is made from the following images:

I then merged them using the the photomerge in Adobe Lightroom.

This was the first dollop of AI generated content as the two images didn’t exactly line up. But this is not too bad as it all it was doing was saving me a lot of fiddling about trying to get the images to merge by hand – a pain of a job but it can be done and if you were very skilled (I never was that skilled) made to look just about as seamless. The obvious problem is that the image is a very odd shape. Next step – move over to Photoshop an apply some Generate Fill and you have, drum roll please…

This has three Generate Fills applied to it: top, bottom and on the left hand side. I’ve then edited and cropped the image. Now here is the interesting question. Is this a fake image? I’m really not sure I have an answer to this as all I have done is merged two images captured within a 10 seconds of one another. Yes I have added part of the sky and the trees on the left, the generative fill on the bottom was cut out by the crop. The actual action, the male swan chasing off the other swans, did happen and his family following did happen but captured on two images, albeit 10 seconds apart. If you had stood there and just watched this rather capturing the images this is what you would’ve seen. Yet the photograph did not exist before the application of a not insignificant amount of AI generated fill.

I have no answers to this questions other than to say, ‘…fix it in post…‘ has never been so poignant.

One final point my new MacStudio absolutely smashed these processes without even breaking into the slightest sweet (I know computers don’t sweat but you know what I mean). This is even more incredible when you consider the final image is over 16000 pixels wide by 8500 pixels tall which equated to a 1.1 GB file in photoshop. Still it took less than 30 second for each fill to be compiled. We really are through the looking glass when it comes to performance.

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