Monday, August 28th, 2023
Deep Space Lecture: Ars analogica – where Hightech meets pure Analog
Eine multimediale Zeitreise zum Ursprung der Fotografie.
Erlebt mit mir den historischen Nassplattenprozess in Form von mikroskopischen Aufnahmen, dreidimensionalen Porträts und 4K-Videos. Bei dieser Reise führe ich euch durch die Geschichte, stelle euch authentisches Equipment vor und präsentiere die daraus entstandenen extrem ausdrucksstarken und hochauflösenden Porträts auf einer 9×16 Meter großen Laserprojektion in 8K. So habt ihr Fotografie noch nie erlebt!
Hier gehts zu Anmeldung für den 13. Oktober:
https://ars.electronica.art/center/de/deep-space-lecture-ars-analogica/
Saturday, August 12th, 2023
my portrait at one of the most beautiful places in Austria
One of the most beautiful places in Austria – During poppy flower season there is a beautiful place to visit here in Austria. The Mohndorf (poppy seed village) in Armschlag. At exactly that place our „Menschenbilderausstellung“ (human pictures exhibition) was exhibited with one of my inspired series portrait. I love that place. Beautiful scenery, good food and a wonderful exhibition.
Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023
Tin Questions Podcast Interview
Excited and proud to share this with you. Chad from Tin Questions interviewed me about my life and my portrait work. I had such a great time and I think it turned out wonderful. Read the intro in Chad’s words:
I recently went camping and got ate up by mosquitos. My next guest on “Tin Questions”, Austrian wetplate photographer Markus Hofstätter, lives in a town known for these pesky insects. Not only is Markus a well known European photographer, he is also a great resource to the wetplate community, sharing his knowledge, doing equipment reviews and similar to “Tin Questions”, conducting the occasional interview. Hear how a love of shooting pool with both sticks and cameras eventually turned into a desire to slow down and create beautiful images using a historic process.
Listen to “Tin Questions” on your favorite podcast provider.
https://open.spotify.com/show/4GtyKMPDLzL9wGIdjXu5do
https://podcasts.apple.com/at/podcast/tin-questions/id1662388680?i=1000623166166
Friday, July 21st, 2023
My Podcast Interview with Silvergrain Classics magazine about my Wet Plate Work and AI
iTunes | Spotify | Deezer | Castbox.fm | TuneIn | Stitcher | RSS Feed
Ep. 13: Hofstätter’s Intensely Personal Portraits vs. AI
by Erik Schlicksbier, Marwan El-Mozayen
Wet plate collodion portrait photographer Markus Hofstätter is our guest in this episode. He creates particularly individual, intimate portraits by collaborating closely with the persons he portrays. This human aspect is especially important to him despite all the virtuosity necessary to create wet plate collodion images. We were also interested in Markus’ view of current developments in the field of AI. Join us in this podcast for an exciting conversation about the present and future of photography.
Markus online:
mastodon.art/@mhaustria@flipboard.social
Your hosts:
Marwan El-Mozayen from Silvergrain Classics magazine (https://silvergrainclassics.com/en)
Erik Schlicksbier, photographer (https://www.schlicksbier.com) and host of the German language Studio Kreativkommune podcast (https://studio.kreativkommune.org/podcast).
Wednesday, June 21st, 2023
I can’t believe I have to let them go
This two tintypes are going to Peter and Nolan. Two fellow wet plate artists who support me on http://patreon.mhaustria.com – Thanks a lot for your support guys. Want yourself one, follow the link ans support me there 🙂
Wednesday, May 10th, 2023
Shooting a HDR tintype with a super fast lens (and get them on Ebay)
When shooting wet plates, you deal with a very light insensitive process (about iso 0.5). So most wet plate artists wants to get their hand on a fast lens. Wolfgang, a former participant of my wet plate workshop got his hand on a very fast lens and sent it over to me. For the first time, you can get the plates from this project on eBay, starting from 1 Euro – http://ebay.mhaustria.com
This Delta HD-6C ML lens is pretty huge and was used in vintage HD protectors many years ago. If you want to know more about this kind of lenses, check this blog post: blog.markus-hofstaetter.at/2023/03/shooting-an-ultra-fast-lens-140mm-f1-with-an-ultra-large-format-camera/
See the full transformation in my video
The yellow part of the flower absorbs a lot of UV light and thats the reason it appears dark when I exposed the plate normally. Thats why I did this series of 4 different exposures. I think every single one of them has something special in it. Just for fun, I created a digital HDR image out of them
Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
Upcoming wet plate talk in Graz, progress and the moon on a space zoom smartphone
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.
Here the link to my lecture about wet plate photography in Graz. https://www.fomograz.at/veranstaltungen-2023/
Wednesday, March 29th, 2023
Thoughts to my video about ai
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”
A new update just came up today and its worth a read: https://time.com/6266679/musk-ai-open-letter/
Wednesday, March 15th, 2023
Testing 6 Types of Wet Plate Varnish
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
Wednesday, March 1st, 2023
How to fix this Tintype/Wet Plate Problem!
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
