YAWN alert Wedding photo

From a wedding job I did recently, No, I don't do weddings but this was by special request! I stopped doing wedding photography a long time ago. Initially I enjoyed doing them but then it just became more of the same and I found it was actually stifling my creativity! Plus you are limited by the venue. This isn't really a good wedding photo, as wedding photos go. But that's precisely why I liked it, and precisely why I grabbed the shot... because no one is looking at the camera, actually no one is looking at each other 😂

Canon EF (Not RF)16-35mm f4 IS L

High and dry, Scarborough Harbour

A couple of shots I took recently with the Canon EF 16-35mm f4 lens, both in Scarborough, Yorkshire coast, UK. I've had this lens for a while now but only just got around to using it in action so to speak. It's not a lens I will use a great deal but it will get used, most of my street photography is done with the Canon EF 24-70mm f4 or the Canon EF 35mm f2 IS lens. I did have the 17-40mm f4 which is great at the long end 40mm but I thought it was lacking a bit on the wide end, this 16-35 just looks cleaner and sharper over more of the frame, with added IS too. I also recently got a Canon EF 100mm f2.8, Macro IS lens which again I've not used it in action yet, but just trying it out I like it already, exceptional image quality. Though there's a lot more to a good photo than IQ, but it's nice to have good tools. It is also a lens I probably won't use a lot, but who knows I might explore macro photography at some point? 

The street portrait below is a Liverpudlian holidaymaker, enjoying an ice cream on the seafront, (as you can see it's a versatile lens) She caught my eye crossing the road because of how diddy she looked struggling to cross with her walker and ice cream in hand. She could be from Knotty Ash, for those who don't get the pun, search Ken Dodd and his diddy men, a late great comedian from Liverpool. 

Street Portrait.

AI or AR Alternative Reality

 

Instagram is full of undisclosed AI generated images passed off as photography, here's one example I saw recently. Also, apart from my comments on the image above, the car appears to have 3 oddly placed doors, on one the break of the door, the crack extends up onto the roof! The general size of the child who looks about 5 years old in comparison to the size of the door window is all wrong too, he almost fills the entire window space! And look where the fuel cap is, if anyone stuck a fuel nozzle into that it would hit the giant kid! If you zoom in on any detail its just a mushy mess, the kids fingers are jammed down in between glass and whatever... he would be screaming in pain! On some images I've seen toes were fingers should be and vice versa!

One could argue anyone who uses Lightroom or Photoshop is using AI... a poor comparison really, since the beginning of photography images have been manipulated in the darkroom and now the lightroom but its mostly acceptable adjustments like exposure in certain areas (dodging and burning) contrast etc, nothing to this gross extent. In fact printing from negatives, or editing digital images is a skill in itself. Typing in instructions to an AI tool takes zero skill, and is a perversion of photography.

With giant water hungry data centres, AI is not only helping to destroy the environment, the climate its also destroying people's perception and understanding of what photography actually is. You cant see all the comments on the image here but just look at how many people (including "photographers") that think this is an actual photograph, 62 reshares and counting! The mind boggles.