In today’s video there is a little preview of my current project, info about my wet plate lecture in Graz and how smartphones change images.
For “non-photographers” some features are really great and very helpful. But then I ask myself why are these features not called by it’s name. Other functions, like changing or even modifying facial features, are almost creepy. What do you think?
In the gallery underneath are a few examples of my moon photos and the equipment. Of course you can take pictures of the moon with small cameras/lenses nowadays, but I was a bit skeptical about the pictures from smartphones back in 2021.
Ai needs to be addressed by all governments to make a change. And they are already to late. The result will be, that people need to adjust. Like painters did when photography was invented. There will be new jobs created because of ai. And for sure some of these jobs will earn less money than the job that was needed for the same task without ai. I have the feeling that this new technology can not be stopped anymore. To many people have invested to much money. Microsoft is already using chatGPT parts in Outlook, Teams and much more, like it’s own search Bing(Google stock crashed on that day when they did the first demo) For example, mails are created automatically because of the communication you had before – its learning to become you. Most companies use ai already for their business. Politicians who should have done something, will not do anything because the world is ruled by money and when there is a technology that can easily make you more money, not many with the power to stop it will stop it. I also think there are lots of areas where ai will help us. To fight diseases for example. So it’s more about regulation than to stop ai.
As said, ChatGPT consumed one Gigawatt in January and I can imagine that all images based AI will consume much more. There you have another reason why this can be bad for us. And still the governments all over the world will tell the people to save energy with electric cars and alternative heating solutions and so on. Nobody talks about power consumption of ai or other internet services.
And chatGPT is just starting. They needed two month to gain 100million users. Instagram needed 30 months, Google translate 78months and Facebook even longer. While Meta consumed already 9.4 Terrawatt in 2021, with all ai growing faster, the power consumption will grow as well. I would love to find more articles about that.
But there are also companies that think ahead. I am testing Adobe Firefly for a magazine right now. This ai was trained by licensed images only. That means artists were paid in some way and that is a good thing (It’s not as good as I thought it will be, I wrote another article about it and will link to it here, as soon as it is online). There is a different way to do things, but I don’t see anybody regulating ai these days for the reasons mentioned above. It’s all about money and I am not a fan of it.
I think there could be a chance to regulate image ai for commercial use these days. It is the fear of people who use ai images commercially. Regulation will start if another ai detects copyrighted images were used to create your image or when lawyers get their first case where they can sue somebody who sold a generated image that looks similar to an existing one from a client. Both cases are again about money. This could be also a chance to regulate Midjourney, but I don’t see anything that can regulate ChatGPT.
With the wet plate process I see myself in a different position, because people get an experience that can not be replicated that easy with ai. I also don’t see my self being a huge fan of ai generated images, but it can be useful in some cases. I don’t like to just talk bad about ai, I am more a fan of finding solutions. As mentioned in a previous post, ai based images should get digital copyright baked into the file, so these created images can be tagged easily on all platform as “computer generated image”. If you want to learn more about that, then check out these links about digital watermarks: Wikipedia article about digital watermarks Image tag, a company who offers digital watermarks as a service An Article on science direct.com about digital watermarks Digital Watermarking Techniques and Security Issues from Jordi Nin and Sergio Ricciardi As far as I understand, you even can screenshot/photograph such an marked image of the screen and the digital copyright still remains. Let’s hear your thoughts about it. I added a gallery underneath with portraits. Let me know which one you think are generated and what gave it away? Maybe you see similarities to existing images… There is also an easter egg “symbol” in the video that shows how ai caught us “over night”. here is a little hint: “don’t feed them after midnight”
Amazon is closing dpreview.com, I never thought such a standard in this industry will be gone in a few days. I put my thoughts in a video. This is frustrating for me, because such a great source of information soon is no more
With todays video I want to give you a glimpse how it is to travel with an ultra large format camera. This time I didn’t bring my darkroom tent, because I could use the shop on the farm. Traveling with my big camera is always a hassle and can bring some troubles with it. But this time it worked out great.
I did a live stream about different types of varnish for my Patreon supporters (If you join tier 2, you can rewatch the recording of the live stream). Because some of you complained after my posting about Lukas varnish that this one is not available in your country, I bought more different ones and did this video. Enjoy guys: I show tested lots of interesting alternatives. My favourite right now is the Cobra odourless varnish gloss 102. You can get it here: international https://amzn.to/3YAVx8k Germany https://amzn.to/429li2D
In short words “this lens is something else”. It’s extremely fast, huge and has a strange focus distance. It was used in Sony CRT Projectors from 1997. I bought it some years ago from a very interesting guy. He had so many more great stuff in his shop and I regret that I did not buy more. It took me some time to find the right opportunity to use that lens. But I think it was worth the waiting. I am glad my friend and former workshop participant Alois Stingl came over with is wonderful ultra large format camera.
Before I could use it, it needed some cleaning, I used a cloth that was soaked with water and just put it on the lens without wiping to avoid more scratches.
with some patience I could clean it.
I measured the lens at infinity to calculate the F-Stop. I measured 135mm and the front element was 145mm That is about a F0.9 lens. But a document I found on the internet told me its more an F 1.0 lens. Still crazy fast.
You can see here how short the focusing distance is. That makes it hard to focus un an ultra large format camera.
When I saw the yellow coating on the front element of the lens, I thought about Mathieu Stern’s videoabout radioactive lenses. If it really is made of Thorium, it is indeed radioactive, but only for a very small amount. Watch Mathieu’s video to learn more about this Material
Thorium was used to get more light into the lenses back then.
Because the lens is very fast it is still dangerous. If it focuses the sun on something, it will start to burn immediately. That’s the reason you should not put the lens near a window and always put a lens cap on it.
In the video I will show you how easy you can start a fire with that lens
I thought it would be interesting to calculate the crop factor of an 40x50cm ultra large format camera. If you use the common formula to calculate crop factors you will see that this plate size has a crop factor of 0.0067 compared to a full frame sensor. With that you also can calculate the comparable depth of field F-Stop. This would also be F 0.067 compared to F 1.0 on a full frame camera. When I tried to focus on the ground glass, I could barley find something in focus. Thats why you see me focusing for a very long time.
it took quite some time to focus with this very fast lens.I think this shows pretty well how sensor and plate sizes compare
But there is more. a 140mm lens is a tele lens on a full frame camera, but it’s a wide angle lens on an ultra large format camera. This is because of the bigger plate size of the ULF camera. listen to my full explanation in the video.
My drawing shows in a simple way that the subject needs to be farer away from a full frame sensor the get the same angle of view as the close setup of the ULF camera.
To “connect” the lens to the camera, I designed and printed a basic flange in Tinkercad. It needed some pool line and tape, but eventually it worked out.
I think Tinkercad is one of the most yeas to use tools for 3D printing.a very basic part, but incredible helpful No screws, just tape, pool liner and my 3d print. Sounds funny, but worked wonderfully
The next issue was the fact that my darkroom was not made for 40x50cm plates. only for 30x40cm ones. After some tests with smaller plates, we only had one cup of developer left. Beside that, everything starts to get unpleasantly expensive if you pour on plates with this size. So my goal was to make it work with only one attempt. I did some dry runs to get comfortable with everything. Not only the dark room work was something I had to prepare for, but also the camera. These old beauties all have some quirks. Besides that, Alois made a beautiful plate holder by himself. These holder needed also some special attention. But as explained in the video, I love these challenges. It makes the result at the end even more sweet.
To calculate the strobe power I needed, I used my wet plate strobe calculator that I created for my Patreon supporters. Since I made it, I use it all the time for myself, because it makes life much easier with the wet plate process. If you are a fan of analog photography and the wet plate process, have a look at our wet plate conversation magazine on Flipboard. Besides many great stories about our favourite process, you’ll wind there also work from other wet plate artists.
I really like how this portrait turned out. As expected it is very abstract because of the F-Stop and the wide angle lens.Here you can see again how huge that tintype is.
But this is not the end, because of some kind of funny coincidence, a former workshop participant sent me a very similar lens over. I am thinking to do a still life plate with that one. What do you guys think?
Two very similar lenses. Funny how sometimes things turn out.
But there is more, I got also a very tiny lens. I guess I need to build a camera for this one
A full functional lens in the size of a thumb. I haven’t seen such a thing before. What a cutie.
I hope you enjoyed that journey. It took me a long time to finish everything, but I am again glad that I worked through it.
I see more and more lines on tintypes these days. From my point of view these appear because of glue residue. In todays video I show you how you can get rid of them. Hope this helps. Let me know if it solved this for you or if you have still this issue. Scroll down for samples
More than 8 years ago I decided to go down this path. Creating all the chemicals I need by myself, refurbishing cameras and lenses by myself, and sometimes creating new parts/recipes myself. This path can be very rewarding and enriching, but there are also dark moments that take a lot of energy. In these 8 years I have experienced and learned a lot. But while working with this process I will never stop learning, it is a constant problem solving and listening to your gut feelings. I think that is also one of the reasons why I love doing portraits with it. Taking a lot of time for a single portrait is another reason. People who have been portrayed by me will certainly be able to name many other reasons why this kind of art is so inspiring. In today’s video you will get a better impression of what I have written.
It was a pleasure to immortalize you on pure silver dear Rita
woohooo – how cool is that. My wet plate portrait made it to the photograph of the year. Thanks to all of you who voted for me and also thanks to Simone Stecher for this nice interview. You can find the digital Version of the interview here: https://news.wko.at/news/niederoesterreich/Der-Geschichten-Erzaehler.html
My own prediction about what will photography be in the future and what I will do about it
I am not doing a rewind or recap this year. I think there are too many of these out there and I have mostly the feeling it’s only a fill-in. You can watch my “end of 2022 studio tour”video or myrecent scanner renovation video if you want to watch something instead of reading this article.
This rose was so beautiful on the last day of the year. I saw her when I put some treats on the trees for the birds. It survived the cold temperatures and is still standing. It reminded me that I am a similar plant that is still standing during that turbulent times of photography
The pink elephant in the room
It’s there, and everybody is seeing it (Also non photographers). Some people are scared, some are angry and others ignore it. What I am talking about? AI, like Midjourney, Dall-Eor the text focused chatGPT. This will not change our world, it changed it already. The ai integration in our lives started a little sneaky, with some cool filters for example, google recaptcha, or enhancements for our phone cameras. Text-wise, we had chat bots that were mostly bad and voice assistants that were somewhere inbetween. Close your eyes and paint your own picture about how you felt about ai at the beginning of 2022. And now face reality and think how much it has improved in the last 5 Months and how much it improves now on a daily bases. For me it’s crazy how great these generated images/portraits look like and how they get better by the hour. It gets harder and harder for me to identify these generated images. I think these “calculated” pictures can be very useful sometimes and many of them look great.
My ai article for the c’t Fotografie magazine – this includes also an interview with the ai artist Klaudia Ratzinger
But I also think that all these generated images should have a digital watermark, so social media and websites can tag them as generated. People need to know if that image they are looking at is real or generated. I know that there is Photoshop as well, but these ai tools can be operated form a 5 year old and the results will fool you. Ai affects already so many business, not only photography, but also writers, lawyers, translators, book authors and many many more. I recently saw an article that a guy used chatGPT to create a children’s book. He also asked chatGPT to write down descriptions for pictures, so other ai picture generators can create imagery for the book from this description. He is selling the finished product now on Amazon. I also read a reddit thread where there was the need for a letter from a lawyer. Somebody asked chatGPT to write a letter and the user asking for a lawyer letter had success with it. You don’t have any programming skills? just ask chatGPT to write a script/program for you.
“Words can be powerful” gets a totally new meaning these days. Talking with chatGPT can also be hilarious – more at the end of this posting
There is so much more you can do with chatGPT
Does that mean we need to be scared as a photographer? I don’t think so. Let me explain:
At the beginning of photography, painters were upset because photographers had no idea about posing and light. Of course it was much easier to get a portrait from one day to another. That changed crime scene documentation totally.
Later black and white film photographers were upset about color film photography.
At the beginning of 2000, film photographers were upset about digital photography
And later digital photographers were upset about phone cameras
And now the same discussion starts with ai generated images. Even we use ai already for many years in our phones (or how do you think it was possible to capture a detailed moon photo with your phone?)
And today all these mentioned techniques are still coexisting. That’s why I think they will also coexist in the future. I think good photographers must be “stage managers” these days. They need to sell an experience. Something the customer will remember for a very long time. For example, when somebody gets their wet plate portrait taken in my studio, they for sure will remember that forever.
This kind of photography is so different in our fast moving world. Sure, people could use a tintype filter. But that is like seeing a great dinner on a photograph instead of going there and enjoying it. Or think of a wet plate workshop, or any other kind of photography workshop. Creating something by yourself is always exciting and fun.
Workshops are always fun
This works also for digital. I just had a business shooting for two days and this can be a great experience as well. People were excited and happy.
I do lots of business shootings, most of them are for bigger companies, but also single ones like this one of Mathieu Stern.
I think that may be a different story for non portrait photographers, like food, architecture or product photographers. But a lot of companies are working already with generated (3D renderings) images for their catalogs. And as far as I know, these generated images are directed by photographers. Please comment how you think other photography business will be affected by ai.
Relax
That is something I am not very good of. I have so much in my mind and want to do everything at once. But I try to go for walks every day to relax. Instead of my camera, I bring my new binoculars with me. I got myself some cool ones for Christmas (US click here – German click here for the ones I bought). So why I am telling you this? Because I felt the need sometimes to bring my camera to my walks, to capture deers, swans and other wildlife scenes. The binoculars are a great substitute for that. They will calm you down, because you can not use them to take pictures. I use them to watch wildlife and enjoy it a lot.
Watching these sparrows is so much fun
My new year resolutions for 2023
Don’t seek for perfect wet plate portraits all the time, accept the one you did and appreciate it. Look for more assignments that you enjoy and less that you don’t. Work more on your own projects you love.
this is one of my very first wet plates. that was about 8+ years ago.
How to load analog film into a Sony A7 digital camera?
Let’s end this post with something fun. I asked chatGPT some questions about wet plate and analog photography. And at the end, chatGPT ended up explaining me how to load film into a Sony A7 camera and why medium format film would not fit in. And no worries, the sensor cleaning and the ibis of the Sony A7 will not destroy your film either. And if you ever looked for a film rewind button on your digital camera, chat GPT got you covered. In that case chatGPT acts like a little child that made a mistake and makes up more facts to cover it. Please be aware that all other answers about the wet plate process and so on contains also false information (I won’t explain everything, but for insiders it’s fun to read). As always, if you are interested in that process, take a workshop or read a book (chatGPT tells you the same). Enjoy the answers guys (You need to open some screenshots in a new browser tab to be able to read them):
