probably the worst attitude tumblr unintentionally cultivates is "the world out there is completely dangerous for you and no one can possibly understand you, so you should isolate yourself from it and avoid interacting with it as much as possible"
"If you put away social media and you walk out into the streets and you look at real people, three-dimensional people, they mostly smile back at you. If you look around you- you see perfectly decent, ordinary people getting on with their lives and inclined, by and large, to rather like each other, that is the real us. Let us not be fooled."
Can we please bring back buttons PLEASE can we bring back buttons BUTTONS PLEASE for the love of god BUTTONS THAT YOU PRESS DOWN AND CAN FEEL IT BEING PRESSED buttons please buttons can we bring them back can we PLEASE can we please bring back the buttons
These outtakes where the flash didn't go off are also AI generated.
I like this spooky dutch angle one.
I was just starting to learn flash and I didn't have all the equipment I needed. Since corgis are quite short, I had to put the lighting on the ground. The off camera flash was on a tipped over lightstand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.
But I had no wireless triggers. And the only other way to trigger a flash, is with another flash. So I used the on-camera pop up flash to trigger the main flash.
But I had two issues.
First, I did not want that dinky on camera flash affecting my picture.
Second, triggering a flash with a flash is best done indoors. The flash will bounce all around the room and eventually hit the sensor so the main flash triggers. When you are outdoors, there is no bouncing.
SO... I took a little handheld makeup mirror and angled it toward my main flash. This blocked the dinky pop up flash and sent the beam of light towards the main flash to trigger it.
I was lying on the wet morning grass, holding a camera in one hand, a mirror in the other, trying to aim the mirror exactly toward the main flash, making crazy noises to get Otis's attention, and trying to get the focus point on his face so I didn't get a blurry photo. Also, Otis was much more interested in sniffing things than posing for a photo.
Here is an overhead view that might help explain.
I await all of your comments saying my amazing drawring is clearly AI generated.
Only 30% of the time did the flash actually go off. Aiming the mirror was tricky and I was doing like 8 things at once. I wasn't even sure I got the photo I wanted. But when I came back to the computer there was one that stood out and it is one of my favorites I've ever taken.
It was the best combination of monumental effort, great discomfort, perfect foggy sunrise light, and just pure luck.
Unfortunately, people like me who use advanced sculpting light techniques are getting accused of using AI more and more. Not really sure what to do about it—other than show the 30 awful photos it took to get the good one.
My 80s sunglasses photo and spoon photo get called out the most.
But it's just good old fashioned gradient lighting which has been used in product photography since the days of film.
Most of my photos with artificial light added would be considered "unmotivated lighting." I think that is the term you were looking for.
The short explanation is that motivated lighting always has a logical source. Like the sun or a window or a lamp off to the side.
That doesn't mean there are no lighting shenanigans used.
The overhead office-style fluorescent lights depicted in this scene were actually powerful diffused light bars that were much closer to the actors. They replaced the ceiling in post with more traiditioinal looking lights. So the lighting was still very crafted—but it has a logic and realism that doesn't set off alarm bells in your brain saying, "Where is the light coming from?"
Unmotivated lighting is the opposite. It's crafted, artificial light that doesn't need to make sense. It just has to achieve the aesthetic goal of the artist.
All studio lighting is unmotivated. I just re-edited this old photo of my dad.
There is no room in the world where he could have sat down and had perfectly sculpted light hitting his face. I intentionally directed the light to accentuate his features and capture the best, most idealized version of what he looked like.
Coincidentally I just wrote a post about motivated lighting in films.
💬 20 🔁 208 ❤️ 349 · First, thank you to everyone who is nerding out with me about motivated lighting. I love that I can have these convers
Weirdly, I expressed a preference for motivated lighting in movies with a realism-based aesthetic and a lot of people disagreed. They said that the lighting comes from the same place as the music and that you just have to suspend your disbelief.
(Personally I think that is a bad analogy because music is *very* motivated by the emotional vibe. I would say unmotivated lighting in movies comes from the same place as women's apocalypse makeup.)
But I *love* unmotivated lighting in still photography. I love crafting an image and creating it in a fantasy realm where perfect, beautiful, sculpting light can come from anywhere. I want the most idyllic lighting possible.
It's the only way I could make fingernail clippers look beautiful.
And now people are saying unmotivated lighting looks like AI or CGI and isn't authentic. Even though this aesthetic was created before computers were invented and the tools of post-capture manipulation were done in a darkroom.
I'm fairly certain this is because AI does not have a great understanding of motivated lighting. It never thinks about where the light is coming from so it almost always creates images where the lighting comes from a fantasy realm. And now people are heavily associating unmotivated lighting with AI, even if it is a subconscious observation.
I think at this point in time, people are yearning for authenticity. We know so much of our imagery is heavily manipulated for nefarious purposes. Beauty advertising with retouched skin like porcelain dolls and liquified torsos that don't leave space for vital organs. Every fast food ad shows the perfect juicy hamburger because they paid a food stylist $500/hour to perfectly cook and arrange things.
But fast food workers are not food stylists and your burger isn't going to have perfect lettuce and a non-smooshed bun.
(Before you reply with urban legends about food styling, they don't use fake materials. They are required to use the actual ingredients. Those myths came from movie prop masters who needed to maintain the look of food during hours of shooting.)
I think AI just turned our uncomfortable relationship with unrealistic imagery up to 11.
It's a little depressing for me because I love to use light as my artistic medium. I say I am a photographer, but my passion is more focused on lighting.
And I often incorporate my other passion, which is image manipulation. I sometimes add another layer of unreality to my images by artistically editing them.
This is days of work.
I worked very hard for the in-camera image. Dragging a heavy chair and lighting equipment into a field on a hot summer day was not easy for me.
But I also worked very hard on the edit. The RAW file is overexposed, but once I corrected that, the lighting on him and the grass is actually what I captured. I hid a flash in the lampshade and lit him with my big 7 foot umbrella off to the right.
I could have shot this at night, but my area has so much light pollution, I would never have achieved the sky I wanted in my head. So I took the photo knowing I'd replace the sky later.
I like crafting images. I like picturing something in my head and then trying to manifest it in a photo.
I get why people are starting to prefer more natural looking images. I understand why they are currently preferring everything to be captured as it was in the moment. I know why they disparage the amazing work of CG artists and demand that every movie use only practical effects.
When everything is fake, a small dose of reality feels special.
But I see my photography more like a drawing or a painting. Light is my paintbrush and I am just trying to manifest my imagination into an image. I don't claim I don't use artificial light. I never say anything is "straight out of camera." I am very open about my use of Photoshop. If I were able to leave my house and go to more beautiful places, perhaps I would take a more motivated approach.
I mean, I love when the world is just beautiful all on its own and all I have to do is competently pick settings on my camera.
But I enjoy my artistic process and while some of my images may not be realistic, I think my artistry is always authentic.
I don't need every person to like every one of my photos. But when I work hard on a photo and there is clear talent and skill involved, I'm hoping people will still acknowledge that. I hope they will respect the effort and artistry involved.
I didn't enjoy the show Breaking Bad. I disliked all of the characters and the story just depressed me more and more as I watched it. But I still think it is an amazing show created by talented artists. I can acknowledge the monumental artistic achievement even if it wasn't my cup of tea.
today i learned that the finnish word for ‘hazardous waste’ is ongelmajäte, which can also translate as ‘problematic garbage’ and my roommate and i immediately agreed this is a word that belongs on tumblr.
There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.
This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?
Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.
Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.
A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.
While this article frames them in terms of romantic relationships, I find that "bids" often appear in relationships of all kinds. We may interact with those bids differently or have different expectations related to bids depending on the kind of relationship we have with someone, but realistically, a lot of how we interact with each other in the world, especially fiddly little social cues and expectations, have to do with these!
Bids in relationships are the ”fundamental unit of emotional communication.” Here's how it can strengthen your connection.
The way we choose to respond to, prioritize, and make bids within our various relationships can have a lot to do with how connected we feel with others, how effectively we are able to communicate our needs and capacities, and how comfortable/secure we are able to be with others.
Design? nonsense, how can you write so! But it is very likely that he may reblog from one of them, and therefore you must follow him as soon as his blog is online.
I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may follow him, or they may follow him by themselves, which perhaps will be still better for them, for as you are as clever as any of them he might reblog most from you of the party.
My dear, you flatter me. I certainly HAVE had my share of cleverness, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up mutuals, she ought to give over thinking of her own reblog counts.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
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