This is Tips from the Top Floor, episode 930 for February the 15th, 2023.
Music.
Hello and welcome. It's Chris, you're listening to Tips from the Top Floor,
the longest running pornography podcast on the planet.
Janet, glad you're here, glad I'm here, and glad here is a new episode of this little podcast.
Let's see, one, two, three, four, five topics today.
Let's kick it off with, okay, there's plenty of photography stuff in there,
and this first one is photography related to, even though I titled it ChatGPD+, is here.
Which it is our favorite chat, chat, AI robot machine. I mean, they've had an interesting thing. And but trust me, in
this photography related, they reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two,
months after launch, this is the fastest growing consumer app ever in the history. And now,
that free service will be or has already started being complemented with a paid service for,
$20 a month. That's what your writing assistant will cost you. It's still free, but the paid
plus version will be faster, and that's the main perk. Faster responses. Yeah, the free
version will have to wait until the paid requests are... And it's already slowing down on the
free version, but it's not consistent anyway in terms of speed. So yeah, it's still in
the free version. Now, why am I talking about this here in a photography show? Well, there's links to photography in in so
many different ways. For example.
You're building a website. You need copy on that website. Guess who will help you write that?
Or general marketing assistance. These systems, and I'm talking plural here because,
ChatGPD is only the first one, there will be many others and they will be as good and better. So,
So you ain't seen nothing yet.
These systems can assist you in creating, I don't know, social media posts,
promotional materials, that kind of stuff.
Use them to write better photo captions. Shoot planning, yeah.
Give me a list of essential photos to shoot at a wedding.
I mean, that's a simple one.
And you can find this everywhere, but how about give me some outside the box suggestions
of, I don't know, shooting promotional photos of a scar band, for example.
And we are photographers, we're not writers, most of us go, yeah, writing, not that good.
And I'd rather have someone help me with that.
So yeah, this is your helper.
Here's the biggest one, I think, and that is client communications.
The system can generate a quick response to like common client questions and that will
free up your time to focus on the creative tasks.
Now, let's do an example. Let's do an example. And by the way, again, doesn't have to be chat GPT.
There's other AIs coming online pretty soon.
And yeah, anyway, here's the real use case that will bring you real benefits in terms,
of professionalism and time savings. Let's say, okay, here's a question that photographers,
get from clients all the time. How much will it cost? And like over and over, you will
explain, you have already explained to the client that it's not just the shoot, it's,
also the post-production. And then some clients might ask for the raw files because they think,
they can do the editing part themselves. And then you explain to them how the post-production
is important and essential to make the photos into the final product and so on.
Well...
Let's get ChatGPD or another AI writing assistant on board and feed a prompt to them. Here's my prompt.
Here, you're a professional photographer, write a quick professional email to a client telling them,
how a photo shoot consists of two parts, the shoot and the post-production,
and that the price always depends on the specifics of the situation and the amount of post-production that's required.
And here's what I did this. I put exactly that one in. Here's what chat GPT gave me.
Subject details on photoshoot process and pricing dear insert client name.
I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to take a moment to discuss the process of our photoshoot and the pricing structure with you.
A photoshoot typically consists of two parts the shoot and the post-production. During the shoot,
we will capture the images and make sure we have everything we need to create the final product. In the post-production phase
we will carefully edit and retouch the images to bring out of their full potential and make sure they meet your expectations.
The cost of the photoshoot always depends on the specifics of the situation and the amount of post-production that is required.
Factors such as the location, the number of images and the complexity of the post-production can all affect the final price.
I'm happy to provide a quote after discussing the details of your specific needs and requirements.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.
I'm here to make sure your photoshoot is a success and I look forward to working with you.
Best regards. Your name here.
Alright, I think that's impressive. Because in the end, that is exactly what I wanted to say and it would have taken me...
I don't know. If I'm smart, I have that filed away somewhere, because it's one of the frequently asked questions.
But if I haven't, then that would have taken me, I don't know, I'm not as good writing
English business mails.
That would have taken me, I don't know, half an hour maybe. And this one took me a minute, maybe two.
So now here's the fun part. This is what excites me because I think one of the biggest uses of these writing assistants,
is already and will be for many to act as a compression and an expansion machine.
We've just seen the expansion. You give it a short prompt and it will expand that into a full professional email.
It expands your prompt into something different.
Now, as a client who receives that email, I might go the opposite direction.
The TLDR principle. I'd like the compressed version.
So, because I don't have time to read all that, so I'll copy that into my GPT writing
assistant and ask you to summarize this for me.
And it spits out a bunch of bullets. And yes, I'm fully aware that this needs to be checked.
Still, GPT stuff isn't 100% bulletproof. But for these kinds of things, hey, the times I tried this,
it did a fairly good job in boiling things down into the essentials for me. So yeah, AI can be
really useful and really useful assistant for such mundane tasks as like correspondence with
clients, even though clients are the most important in our job. But I'm not as good,
of a business male writer. So that can help me be more professional. And by the way.
It does quite a bit more. I mean, simple things, you can have it whip up a quick contract for a
photoshoot. And if it's not perfect on the first try, then tell it that you're missing X, Y, and Z
and it'll give you these parts as well. Or have it write a model release, or a shot list for something
or, I don't know, let it suggest a schedule for a photoshoot. You name it. There's so many different
possibilities here. And that's where I stand with regards to our new AI assistants. I mean, they,
They are assistants.
They will take things off our hands that we might not be that good at, such as writing.
And what the AI, of course, will not do for a long, long time is take the photos.
I don't think your job is in danger. AI might make things easier on one side, but in the end, you will be looking through the
viewfinder.
You will be the one who determines what's in the frame and what isn't.
And you will be the one to press the shutter button.
All right. On to space. Yes, here's one. Juno.
The Juno spacecraft. NASA's Juno spacecraft is a spacecraft that had and will have several flybys of Jupiter.
And they have a photo problem. Unfortunately, you can't just go out there and fix things.
You have to do it remotely. So what's happening?
OK, the Juno spacecraft has a camera. It's the Juno cam.
And during its recent Jupiter flyby, most of the photos that it took were unusable.
Unusable.
Now, the camera, it's an RGB camera It was originally put on board to generate material for public relations and public communication.
But then, of course, the scientists found ways to also use it.
So the camera system, NASA says it's a visible light color camera designed to capture images,
of Jupiter's cloud tops.
The problem occurred during the spacecraft's last flyby.
The Jupiter flyby on January the 22nd.
And NASA says that they see when they boot up the camera system.
So I don't know what it exactly, I don't think they put like a Canon DSLR on there.
I think that's a home built, homegrown system with a processing back end and so on.
And so what they found out is that, And this thing goes to sleep, of course, to save energy when it's not needed.
And then they boot it up.
And what they saw is that the whole thing heated up after powering up.
And it took a while. And the high temperature subsided after a while.
It looks like, you know when...
I've seen this. I open my laptop or I boot a laptop after a month or something and then,
not that that happens too often, but then it has to do some housekeeping and it'll go
off and do some scripts in the background and stuff so the the CPU usage goes up and it heats
up a bit. Just out of my personal experience, it sounds like something along those lines.
So they had in the last one in December, they had the same thing, but the system normalized a bit quicker.
Now in January, it didn't normalize quite as fast.
But what happened is that they only got to get 44 images of good quality and usable images out of that flyby.
And I think that about 200 or more pictures were not taken.
So, hmm, I don't know, they're evaluating the data they have to determine the cause of the problem.
And then the next flyby is on March the 1st, and they will hopefully have that fixed by then.
Well, remote camera fixing doesn't sound easy. Anyway, I'll keep an eye on that.
Next topic, Darktable. Do you use Darktable? So Darktable is an open source, well what is it,
a raw developer, an asset manager for your photos, very much like Lightroom. It looks similar and
offers similar functionality. But again, it's open source, it's multi-platform, runs on Windows,
on macOS and different Linux flavors.
And being open source, it's community supported. Pisa software, it's free.
And one part of that support that people put into this is that, like, let's say you update,
or they update the darktable version, they put new features in and so on,
and they have to compile it for the different platforms.
Needs to be checked for the different platforms to make sure like things run well and,
Or run at all and then it needs to be,
Packaged like put into this installer package so you can download it to your computer and install it and,
For the Mac OS version of darktable.
This has been done by one guy for ten years.
One person Ten years and this guy is going to quit. I don't know why. Maybe it's the bandwidth, it's the health, I don't,
Whatever it is.
What this means is that the future of the dark table Mac OS version is in jeopardy if.
If they don't find someone to pick up that thing.
And then then there will be no future dark table versions for Mac OS as simple as that
It's no one. No one does the work Nothing will happen,
now Personally, I don't use Darktable. I know people who do on macOS and I'm pretty sure they would
hate the idea of not receiving updates in the future. So I guess this is a call to action if
you understand anything of what I just said up there. And if you use Darktable, if you know
your way around software development on macOS, then yeah, this might be your chance to contribute
to a great community-driven software project.
I will link the relevant Reddit post in the show notes.
All right, second last topic.
This is, okay, this is something that kind of spiraled a bit out of control.
So I came across an article in Petapixel, which is linked in the show notes about an AI image winning a photo contest.
Nothing unusual now at this point in time. We've seen that happen before.
The photo is looks like a drone shot from above a beach. And you see the sun, it's an evening shot and the sun is shining in from the sea.
Warm, low sun. Then there's a there's waves breaking and that the light behind the warm side, behind that breaking wave is in the
shade and it's bluish because it's like the water is translucent and the sun shines through the water. And, and then
there's shadows and then there's two dark figures that you see from the top with a surfboard that run into the surf and well.
That's what they do. So the light is an amazing shot from from the composition and the light and it lacks a bit of plausibility in terms of the,
direction of the waves but hey, I looked at it and I went wow, this looks cool. And of,
course the comments were full of.
Of triggers or of triggered people. And one wrote, I hate this, I don't want to sound like,
I don't want to sound elitist here, but there's a reason people look at a photograph like this,
if it's real, and are in awe of the difficulty and timing required to capture a moment like this.
Photographs are a unique formula of the end result coupled with the knowledge of how the image was
taken this image is not for me, because as I said, it was not a challenge to create.
Alright, so I want to say a few things here and then take you down that rabbit hole that I went
down. So first of all, writing this image, there was no challenge to create. Wrong. If you've,
worked with prompting of different AI based image generators, then it takes work.
The reason I know is because I've done it and my friend Jeremiah Chechik who I'm on
the Future of Photography with, by the way, weekly show about photography, three of us,
so just, yeah, you'll get more of me there.
So Jeremiah is, he's even deeper down that AI image generation rabbit hole. He's a true artist.
I'm a, I would call myself a craftsman when it comes to photography.
Jeremiah is an artist and he is...
Wow, he spends days and days on one photo and massages the prompt and changes the different weights of tokens and stuff and it's amazing and the results are amazing.
Really, really amazing. So the thing is, it does take... it is a challenge to create.
But...
Of course, what that brings up, and here's my rabbit hole, is what is the value of a photo?
It's a question that comes up so often. What is the value of a photo? What determines the value
of a photo? So I looked into that. Of course, I do have my own answers, but I went down a few
routes. And I think there's two distinct sides of this coin when it comes to value and relevance
of a photo. And the first one is, of course, in a commercial context. We always have to see context
here. So the first one is in a commercial context. And there it comes down to, yeah, a bit of a supply
and demand calculation. And, and of course, attributes of a photo, like, okay, let's say a photo,
has historical significance, the level of historical significance does determine value.
Right? Like napalm girl, for example, the photo that in the end helped end the Vietnam
War, or a photo of the JFK assassination, or Tankman on Tiananmen Square and so on.
There's plenty of photos with historical significance, and of course, their value is
higher than a snapshot of that you took of a few flowers in your garden. The second one is,
How rare is it? And rarity doesn't matter if there's no demand, of course, a rarity and demand,
play together. Like here's an example. I've just recently seen a photo of a single atom.
Some scientists took a photo of a single atom and wow, that must be a rare thing to do. So that
immediately increase the value that I gave that photo. Of course, if you work in a commercial
context, customer relevance, right? Contract, commercial work, what's the question? What's
the purpose of the photo? There's someone who has a need for a photo to advertise something,
to trigger a buying decision, and so on. So then we talk about a value chain. Like, the
client has a purpose, you provide skills and equipment, and that adds value for the client
and that value is the value of the photo.
So this is a very, very businessy look on this. But then of course, there's the second route, and that's the intangible values of a photo.
They come down to...
Things that you and I can really easily relate to, like personal relevance.
Is it a vacation shot, a family shot, a wedding shot? Is it art? That means something to me.
The value is defined by the relationship to the photo and to the content of the photo.
The photo itself, the physical object in that case, is very irrelevant. The content is everything.
The value is in the content, it's in the moment that you froze on the paper or on the screen,
it's in the event.
So like, let's say a blurry cell phone shot of cutting the cake at a wedding, that can
be worth infinitely more than the expensive professional shot that completely misses this moment.
And the value of that photo is 100% subjective.
The physical photo doesn't have a real value compared to what's on the photo and what that triggers in us.
You can easily see that if you think of like wedding photos of a stranger's wedding.
Someone in a different country has a wedding.
Those might be worth this for you.
Now I asked that question. I asked that question to the happy shooting community here on our German podcast and it
ended up with discussions in forums and on Slack and so on.
But they all pretty much came down to the same few points. It's about who's in the picture, the value is determined by what situation it is, what,
a memory what's what the memory is that that evokes and if it evokes emotion that's pretty
much unanimous unanimous over everyone so AI does AI can AI do that that's I think the
main question because it it.
Yeah, it's a very good question. I don't have a very good answer to it other than when I saw that picture. I didn't immediately identify it as an AI picture and it looked interesting to me and I liked it and I could imagine that hanging on a wall somewhere.
So yeah, well, and there's two more aspects to that.
One is, I've talked about this here on the show before, the locksmith's paradox.
This is an aspect that is especially interesting in the context of like commissioned work,
commercial work, because the sense of value is in these contexts is often completely turned upside down.
Like okay, the locksmith's paradox. Let me reiterate what the locksmith's paradox is.
You are a young locksmith, you've just started your job, you're not really good at opening locks.
But you know, people call you at night because they can't get the lost, they left the keys
in the car or in the house and they can't get in and you come and you drill open the
lock, you destroy the lock, but they're happy because you help them.
It takes you an hour and they still give you a tip and give you five stars on a platform.
And over the years, you become way more skilled at opening locks.
You will not need to destroy the locks of the clients. You will go there with your tools that you've known for years and you will go click, click,
click, click, click.
And in five minutes that lock is open and you've done the client a huge favor because
they don't have to stand out in the cold for an hour. And uh...
Being fast, being good, being skilled in what you do, doesn't, is not valued. Because now you see the.
Tips getting smaller, you see the star ratings get lower because, well, the client doesn't know
anything about locksmithing and they don't know anything about lockpicking and the skill that you
built up makes it look so easy that the client is not able to see the value in it. So the upside
down value thinking here is often if it looks complicated and if it takes a long time then,
it must be worth a lot more. But you as in terms of photography, if you are really good, you will
be able with a cheaper camera, with less equipment, with less preparation, you'll be able to get,
a good result quicker than someone who's new and who takes forever and doesn't even know what they're doing.
And if you got there with a camera that doesn't look as big and professional and you don't
bring a big, I don't know, lighting setup, because you are really good at using available light, then the client will not,
think that the photos are as good. The value of the photos is lower. So that's an aspect when it comes to value.
And the second and the last aspect here that I thought about is the knowledge of this being an AI picture.
Does obviously change its value because people think, oh no, you just type in a prompt and then it pops out a perfect picture.
We've seen this and we still see it when it comes to exhibitions of prints.
Now, in the past, you used to have a negative on film and you enlarged it onto a photo paper,
which was silver based, and then the inkjet printers came along.
And the inkjet printers, sort of in the minds of the recipient, they devalued pictures because,
hey, you just put a paper in, you press a button, out comes a print, there's no skill,
in that and so on. What they don't see is that it's an art to do a good inkjet print.
There's like highly specialized suppliers who have very specialized inks, like 10 grey,
tone inks that's specifically formulated for a specific paper and then you end up with,
special piece of software that rasters the image and you need a lot of skill to get this right and then the resulting prints are as,
good if not better as a silver print and they will.
Last longer because the inks used are more stable in under UV light than than silver is and so on so.
What did the galleries do? Well, they renamed inkjet prints. Inkjet doesn't sound artsy
They found a French term called Giclay.
C L double E, G-clay, which translates in French to spray, which is what an inkjet printer
does, it sprays ink onto a paper.
So it's G-clay prints and the question I've seen several times is what's the difference
between a G-clay and an inkjet print?
A couple of hundred bucks.
So value is highly subjective. like to know what makes a picture valuable for you from your specific context. Could
be a commercial context, could be a personal context, maybe you have something to add,
go to tfttf.com slash hi, tfttf.com slash hi and let me know. Okay, last bit here in,
the show about skies, skies in pictures. I came across a video, a Vox video, which had
a great photography related story that has everything. It has this is about photography,
it has a mystery, some detective work, and it's about postcards. So there's this guy
and he collects postcards. Like it's his thing. He goes to garage sales and whatever places
where you can get old postcards and he collects them and he sorts them and he catalogs them
and then he starts noticing the same clouds in different postcards.
And not just a couple, it's like 50, 80, 90, 100, whatever, like lots of different postcards from
different businesses and locations that have things that are touristy that have postcards.
And yeah, it's the exact same sky. Sometimes it's mirrored, but it's very obviously the same sky.
So the video goes researching this, they talk to postcard historian and find out why that might be the case.
And it's a fun story. It's, yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed that.
So that is the same sky phenomenon.
And I'm glad I learned about it.
Music.
And that was it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
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TFTTF.com slash hi. Let me know if you use AI assistance and what you do with them in your photography.
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Let me try that one again. out more at tfttf.com slash support.
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The public release is always after the Patreon release. Oh, a quick update on the Eastern European Electric Photo Road Trip in September of this
year.
Yes, I renamed it because that's an important aspect of it. It's filling up, over half of the spots are already taken.
We'll set off from the vibrant city of Berlin in Germany and embark on an epic 10-day adventure,
through some great historic destinations in Eastern Europe, from the charming streets,
of Prague to the elegant architecture of Vienna, the rich history of Budapest and the captivating
landscapes and history of Transylvania.
A trip to remember, pack your bags, get ready for a unique 10-day experience filled with,
great memories where you capture the beauty and rich history and culture of Eastern Europe through your lens.
Learn more at discoverthetopfloor.com and if you're in Germany, you'll also find our,
2023 film photography and large format photography workshops there, here in the Viewfinder Villa
right outside the gates of Hanover, Germany.
Discoverthetopfloor.com And now go out and take amazing photos.
Be nice to each other and...
Music.