Back in Park City, Utah. Snow. More snow. Still more snow. Supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow and snow every day and night for the next two weeks. This was the sort of winter we had back in the early and mid-nineties. Back when some years it snowed on the fourth of July. I had thought that this sort of weather was a thing of the past at this latitude. I guess not. It is fun. It’s also nice to be able to head south to southern Nevada when it tends to overwhelm. Soon. Maybe when the driveway shoveling has been accomplished.
Since my last post I’ve been up to a few interesting things. I have gotten out and about in the lower elevation reaches of Park City and have posted a few photos, around seven-hundred, in my photography galleries. Specifically these are in my park city utah usa 11, 12 and 13 galleries. As mentioned above it is supposed to snow a whole bunch more in the next little bit so I expect I may head out again whenever the blue-bird days arrive, as they always do in this part of the world, at the end of this cycle of storms. Processing winter photography is a bit of a pain — making the snow the right amount of white without screwing everything else up. It is beautiful. There is absolutely no denying that.
And just experiencing the Park City vibe is sweet. Hitting the gym and finding the Ukrainian and Chinese ski-aerialist teams working out at the same time, amicably but separately, because a world-cup event had just completed and they were getting their gym time in before moving on to the next event in Sweden. No wonder I am a globalist. It’s been a hallmark of the culture here for the thirty years that I have experienced.
Before heading up here, maybe three weeks ago, maybe a little less, I was hunkered down in Southern Nevada and alternating between writing Python and doing exercises learning more Python. I guess I’m officially into Python. One exercise in particular had a substantial effect on me. This involved scraping the Billboard Magazine Hot-100 list for the top 100 songs for a given date, using something called beautiful soup, and creating a playlist on Spotify for those songs using the Spotify API. This got me into listening to a lot of old music and got me started with a couple of books on the music of the last fifty years. One on the Billboard Hot-100 was written by a guy who started a pandemic-era blog summarizing every number 1 hit over the years since the early 60’s. The other, as sort of an antidote to the first, was a collection of the best of the Rolling Stone magazine interviews over a similar time period.
More on all of that in a later post. I’m still exploring. I do have my favorite radio stations available everywhere thanks to TuneIn. There is the local Park City station. The Paris jazz station. The Ibiza smooth rock station. The Playa del Carmen mixed Spanish language and American rock station. The Hawaiian reggae station. But suffice it to say that I had gotten myself stuck in a rut when it comes to music. Much of the popular music over the last twenty or so years just doesn’t register for me. I do like some rap and hiphop but a lot of it isn’t for me. Rhianna’s half-time show just didn’t do it. I’m sure it works for many. Who am I to judge?
I once was a huge music fan and returning to the large number of songs, that were special for me, of that era, is good, but is also a bit flat because I have heard them so many times. Jazz has been a thing of mine for a long time but it is different and doesn’t really solve the popular music dilemma. I have gotten into Spanish-language music over the last ten years and that does do it for me. And now in just a few recent weeks, the Billboard Hit-100 hit lists of the popular songs of my youth, in particular my teenage years, have brought me a quite-long list of long-forgotten music and artists, that I’m now exploring well beyond the hit lists.
I’m listening to the greatest hits of WAR right now and have, I am pretty sure, left the rut. “Don’t Let No One Get You Down:” a good rap song from 1975.
And not to let the subject of artificial intelligence go without mention because it is the hot topic of the moment, I started messing around with Chat-GPT back in November. I found it fun, informative, but very slow. So slow that I didn’t do much with it.
Now I’ve gotten into two different applications of AI that are a bit less abstract and are incorporated into products directed at solving specific problems. One is the use of AI in the manipulation of photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The other is the use of AI to generate Python, Javascript, HTML and CSS code from comments in Microsoft VS Code using GitHub Copilot. I’m just barely getting started with the later, haven’t really figured it out, and will get into it in a future post.
As to the Adobe AI tools, I’m pretty far along with developing work flows for both processing new images and re-processing old images and am thinking I will be using them extensively going forward. In addition to After Effects rotoscoping and the content aware features of the photo products, there are three different ways that I am using AI in Adobe products that I am pretty sure are AI based.
The first is the use of recommended presets. The way this works is you direct Lightroom to a photo and ask it to recommend presets. Apparently they have been quietly training their models with all of our photos for quite a while now. Or so says the Internet. This brings up a series of AI-recommended photos with different pre-set values applied to all of the various properties that can be changed to alter the image in Lightroom. The generated images can be compared to the initial image and to each other. You can then select one that you like, return to using the original image, or request more images that are similar to one of the recommended images.
It’s really fun. About half of the recommended images are really bad, or, better put, not useful. Several are very close to the original. And often a few improve on the original. Sometimes by a lot but usually just by a little. Sometimes they all fail and you just move on. I find that using the selected preset image as a starting point for more tweeking of the sliders to get things just right is appropriate. At a minimum it is a great way to start working with an image to see what possibilities are there. Experimenting with it with food photography images it also is a great source for creative solutions. Emphasizing just a couple of colors in an otherwise black and white image for example. And it is a wonderful way to get familiar with all of the various approaches to changing a photo in Lightroom because you see all of the ways that others have used it.
I am beginning to go through all of my old photos using this process. So far I’m about a third of the way through just Arizona. It is something that takes a half-minute or a few minutes per photo, and it is great on mobile, so it is perfect for those times when you are bored, waiting for something or someone, and looking for something to do. I do go over all of my AI edits on a larger screen afterwards and often find that they don’t look right and need to be redone. It may take a while to get through the 46,000, or whatever it is, images in my photography galleries.
The second AI tool I’m now using is automatic masking. I am very good at doing this manually, so it is a case where I have been replaced by technology. I am OK with that. Manual masking is drudgery. It is especially useful with separating the sky in images so that it can be manipulated independently because the sky often has very different light qualities than the foreground. I’ve messed around with subject masking but have found it useful only in cases where the subject is clearly and distinctly defined. Once they figure out masking of more obscure and diffuse subjects it will be very useful for implying depth of field. I’m looking forward to that. Beyond cool.
And third I’m using the color matching feature in Photoshop to deal with a bunch of slides that I had scanned and were returned with really bad color profiles. I usually took both digital and film photos in cases where I took slides. So I’m finding that I can easily color match the screwed-up scanned image with the true digital image and get a good starting point for manipulation of the scan. It has turned me off of getting other images scanned at least for the time being. I’m beginning the process of reprocessing all of the old scans. Be careful who you choose to scan your images. AI saves the day.
And last but not least. It looks like it is back to Europe with me, later in the year. Maybe twice. France and Spain and, who knows, Germany. I am thrilled. Beyond excited. Adios Pandemic. So long it has been good to know you.