Amersham Beyond Group - 2nd Mar 2023

Meeting Notes on Creative Photography and Photo-Art
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

Amersham Beyond Group - 2nd Mar 2023

Post by spb » Fri Mar 03, 2023 1:47 pm

MONTHLY CHALLENGES
All our Challenge images can be seen at Amersham Beyond Group on Flickr

For APS Members only, the images are also available for viewing and commenting on Facebook here.

The current Challenges are;

#34 LIGHT IN THE DARK
#35 DECONSTRUCTED LANDSCAPE

… and the latest Challenge,

#36 SHOOT THROUGH

We saw quite a lot of shots through glass but also curtains, ice, arches, a banknote and even a multi-lens toy insect-eye!

The next Challenge is;

#37 OUT OF BOUNDS

This probably needs some further explanation …..

An image in which the subject is taken outside of its boundaries and presented in a 3-dimentional perspective. This is normally achieved by post-processing but could also be realised by cutting and re-photographing prints. These are also known as pop-out images.

Another interpretation could be an interactive border in which the image stretches out onto the border eg an image contains a flock of birds and a few fly onto or beyond the frame.

There are a lot of video tutorials online, often under the general heading of Pop-Out Effect.

There are some good examples of a variety of Out of Bounds images here.


BEYOND US - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Dall-E is a popular AI image generator at the moment - Ken and Juliet showed us impressive AI responses to the Shoot Through Challenge.

Nigel informed us that Microsoft is promoting Bing at the moment and as part of that is free offering credits to Bing Image Creator which uses Dall-E. He showed us a variety of images in classic painterly styles.


David has been impressed by Topaz Labs tools that incorporate AI such as Gigapixel, De-Noise and Sharpen to restore old photographs or new ones that need to be up-sized or cleaned up. They are not cheap, however.

NEXT MEETING

Thursday 6th April in the Drake Hall, Amersham Community Centre.

BACK OF BEYOND – DIARIES
iPhone 14 Pro Max – Update. Having just used the four phone cameras intensively whilst abroad, I am pleased with the results. In low light, the software makes a valiant effort to stabilise and combine multiple handheld exposures to capture as much detail as possible but the results would not stand up to close scrutiny. Otherwise, the range of focal lengths from extremely wide to short telephoto is very useful. If I had seen anything spectacular to capture I would be able to produce competition-quality images from a compact phone always in my pocket. The ergonomics will never match those of a traditional camera but that is countered by the availability of a large pre-view screen. In strong sunlight visibility is close to zero despite the ‘brightest ever’ screen.

I made the mistake of assuming that the sensor was 16:9 and I set this as my default. This proved to be wrong as it results in 9Mpx images instead of the full-size 12Mpx images at 4:3. I thought that I had compromised the quality of all my holiday images until I discovered that the phone stores both the full-size image as well as any ‘processed’ image which includes a 16:9 crop. So I was relieved to be able to delete the 16:9’s without loss. I purchased additional iCloud storage for the trip and it was reassuring to know that the images were going to the cloud as soon as possible and images from both of our phones were aggregated for review.

For wider shots the panorama setting stitches up to 180 degree pans seamlessly so long as you keep the camera level. At the other extreme macro clarity is spectacular.

Cheers, Steve

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