God's well aware that I'm not his strongest soldier and he's not giving me his toughest battles, but I won't lie the battles I am getting are kicking my ass
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.
This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh... I figure it's okay to share bc it's kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.
Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too
This is FREE, please don't pay for the pattern.
Only the EMBROIDERY is paid.
Remade by AeilithArt so that we could use the pattern without like, destroying it. It's not exact since it's trace, but it's p much the same
the new court photos of luigi mangione absolutely grinning ear to ear in court Right after evidence was released that he wasn't properly read his Miranda rights and all the evidence had a high chance to be completely dismissed from the case is fucking hilarious. that is the face of a man who KNOWS he's walking home free
"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book
also, if you decide you REALLY wanna watch the new show/ movies THAT BAD, pirate that shit!!!! piracy is your best friend along with a good vpn!!!! if you wanna buy her books, thrift it! go on ebay or pangobooks or your local library or a thrift store or depop! don't give that wench your money!!!!
I'm gonna hold your hands while I say this: it's not enough.
HP Fandom isn't just a problem because of the direct financial support. It also continues to infuse the IP, and JKR as a result, with cultural capital and social influence. It gives jkr a cultural relevance that means her words are platformed more seriously and more widely than other authors whose works are not infused with this level of sustained popularity. She has said, very plainly, that she (and the people who will fund her future projects) views ALL Fandom action as support.
And also, quite frankly, the last book was published in 2007. Please read a new book.
A hint of pink a splash of stockings, with a sprinkling of gorgeous sunlight - the perfect recipe to hopefully show that lingerie can look good on any body.
People who interpret "character playlist" as "playlist of songs the character would listen to" as opposed to the good and honorable "playlist that represents the character" are so alien they're chasing me and my cat around the spaceship. That metaphor got away from me. Much like the cat
The excerpt paragraph made me look up and stare at my wife for three solid minutes waiting for them to return to the couch. I couldn’t move on with my life. I had to read it aloud to them to their audible disgust and then they read all the comments with unbridled delight.
The Bad Sex Awards are a gem. You don't have to be male to be nominated.
I legitimately thought the passage exerpt from his book was meant to be satire, then realised that this seems to be a real exerpt from a published novel. With worse sex scenes than I've seen in fanfiction written by teenagers, many of whom haven't even HAD sex.
As a professional writer you can't really expect that nobody is ever going to comment on what you write. Especially if you write sex scenes that are uh...interesting or pretentious.
So, if you're not in a techbro-adjacent world you might not know this, but a lot of gamer bros have finally started rebelling against AI. Because they were all waiting for Black Friday sales to get new PC parts, but AI companies are buying up all the PC parts, so they all logged in on Black Friday looking for deals and found everything three times as expensive as it was a few months ago. And I mean everything. It's not just GPUs this time like it was with the crypto miners, it's RAM and SSDs and even fucking HDDs.
You tell a gamer bro he can't get a 1TB SSD for less than 200 smackeroos and he'll be against anything you tell him is to blame.
There's also a large migration of gamers to Linux, which came as a surprise to me when I first learned it because the conventional wisdom for so long had been that you can't game on Linux at all. The release of the Steam Deck changed that narrative overnight, since it runs on a custom Linux distro that Valve made because they don't want to deal with Microsoft's bullshit either. The vast majority of PC games now run just fine on Linux, and the only ones that don't are ones that use a specific form of anti-cheat software (mostly online competetive games, like League of Legends). Even that will probably change in the future, since the migration to Linux will incentivize game companies to do their anti-cheat differently.
Most of the linux distros that people are moving to have no AI features and no intention of including them. And, of course, even if some develop them in the future, the linux community can always be counted on to provide a no-AI alternative. They are extremely protective of their disc space, after all. So there is a real coalition building here, in a population that has a lot of cash to use to lean on the powers that be. I think we have some reason to be optimistic.
titsay
baratheonpilled
vaporwave
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
izzy806
blakekathryn
jbbartram-illu
turnnoffyourmind
