Angry about office jets, a German photo wallpaper, moon mode, magic and a day to remember.
It's the weekend, it's mid-March and you are listening to episode 931 of Tips from,
the Top Floor with special guest Don Komoretzka.
Music.
Hey, hello there, this is Chris, back from the dead. Well, it's just been a few weeks, not quite dead. Yes, today it's a special episode because I have
a special guest. It's been an interesting few weeks. Preparations for the Eastern European
electric road trip almost sold out. The second tour, the reverse one mid to end of September,
that one is full. The first one from Berlin to Transylvania, September 2nd to 11th,
still has a couple of spots open. So if you're interested to see the glory of Eastern Europe,
including Prague, Vienna, Budapest and then meet my friend and co-host Henry in Transylvania then,
hop on over to discoverthetopfloor.com only two spots left discoverthetopfloor.com. What else?
I've been guest on Photo Geek Weekly. I've just recorded an episode of the two hosers with Ellen
Ettridge and then there was happy shooting of course and the future of photography and an
an episode of Curiously Polar. So if you've been missing me here, then yeah, I've been
all over the place. Anyway, now I'm thrilled to have Don Koporechka back on tips from the
top floor. Don is, okay, let me let me see if I can get this right. Don is a renowned
nature macro and landscape photographer. He's from Canada. Originally, he now lives
in Bulgaria. It's almost in shouting distance to the to the Eastern European photo road
trip in September. Don's work is amazing. He teaches workshops on nature, macro photography has authored and photographed
several books, including the popular or came holding it up,
even though we're not recording video, the sky crystals book.
And of course, the latest one, the macro photography book, the universe at our feet. Don has also worked with the BBC, with,
discovery with National Geographic.
I'm not worthy. Chris, it's so great to be on the podcast again and to be chatting and you know, you
showed up my accolades and stuff, but you know, it's one of those things where if you're
in a niche in the photographic space, no matter how obscure it is, somebody around the world
is going to need that expertise.
Oh, yes. And so I find it fascinating where I get calls from.
I got an email from somebody that is working on a book of, I don't know, they kind of said just glowy things in general.
I'm not sure if that means bioluminescence or fluorescence or phosphorescence or what have you,
but they've gotten in touch with me because I'm the kind of person that can give them
what they need, whether I already have it or on a commissioned basis.
And it's just so fascinating when you see how far, like in what strange little places in the world of publications or what have you, that
you can apply your craft.
It's wonderful. I think that would be a perfect title for you as well.
Don Komarecka, photographer of glowy things. I'll take it. I've been called worse. Glowy things.
All right. What have you been up to? We haven't, well, we have talked on your show a few weeks ago, but that's a few weeks ago
and you are a busy man. So anything. Yeah.
Sprung here and it's the first year of moving to a new continent is basically a
blur you know like you so much stuff that you have to set up and all of the
bureaucratic processes that you have to go through so last spring I really didn't get to enjoy much of it but this year man I just walked through our
little village and I I just it smells the air here smells wonderful this time
of the year all the trees are blooming and so I'm trying to relax a little bit
for the first time in a very long time to kind of take a step back for even just a week or two.
And explore the beauty and the nature and sort of reconnect with that sort of world without a
camera in my hand. I've got a feeling I'm very quickly going to pick up my camera and that's
not going to last as long as I expect it to. But yeah, that's what's been up in the last couple of
weeks. And while we up here in Germany, we still have somewhat around freezing temperatures right
now. Where you live is in the southeast from here so it's much more south it's
much warmer. I remember last summer when I was in Romania it felt like Tuscany Italy.
It was warm, it was nice, it was the plants, the vegetation is amazing, everything is great.
And as somebody that's made a career photographing snowflakes and cold things, you held up that book.
It's an interesting paradigm shift, that's for sure, because I don't miss the snow.
And I've got, I still have over a thousand unedited snowflake images, because you might
shoot 50 of them in a day if the conditions are great, but when it takes you four or five
hours to edit one of them you'll always have a backlog. So what will replace the snowflakes?
Bugs? No, I'll still be doing a snowflake series every, you know, this past December,
from December 1st until Christmas Day, I posted a snowflake every single day.
And that's a good commitment to keep going. Is Bulgaria proper snowflake terrain for new photos?
In our backyard, no, we're close to the Black Sea. But the Bulgarian landscape is basically
seven distinct mountain ranges and a coastline.
And it's got some really great ski resorts. I haven't been to Bansko yet, but it's
in the center of the country.
And it is one of the greats in Europe.
So could I make it a business expense to go to a 4 and 1 1⁄2 star resort in the mountains?
Of course you should. I think that's a possibility. Wonderful.
Awesome. So for this episode of Tips from a Top Floor, I've picked out a few topics that I found interesting
and that you might have a few things to say on as well.
Let's dive right in. And the first one is HP. I used to work for HP many, many moons ago.
And- Oh, this will be good.
Well, no, I have nothing to do with them anymore. And I'm kind of glad when I read the next thing
because HP is ratcheting up their DRM with new printer firmware.
There's like some of the office jets now require the presence of an HP chip in the in-card cartridges to print at all.
So that has brought in quite some frustration from some customers, because...
As we all know, yes, if you print photography, if you want the best possible outcome, the best longevity in terms of UV protection and ozone protection,
it's often advisable to use the proper inks, the proper papers, because they have been tested together and so on.
On but if you use an office jet in an office context with the odd table or chart or whatever
that you print out a lot of that happens with refilled ink and with third-party cartridges
because it's just so much cheaper because let's be real here those ink cartridges cost an arm
and a leg. Well part of it though Chris if I'm not mistaken for those simple desktop printer
setups. When you buy the ink cartridge, you're also, and this isn't universally true, but you're
also buying the printhead as well. They kind of bundle them together. Everything is in there,
pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. And I've spent a week in, actually back in 2008, I spent an entire week in,
an HP development and test lab for their printers in San Diego. And that's where they have these big
UV chambers and ozone chambers and things and they test their own inks and papers and,
and third-party inks, refill inks and those refill inks are often a lot worse in terms of.
Light stability and so on. So some of those might fade after a week or two in the sun.
So there is a reason that at least HP gives that as a reason the customer experience is so much
better with our original inks and so on. But up to this point you had the opportunity to dismiss,
a notification from the printer software telling you, ah, this is not genuine.
And you could just click that away. But now that's not possible anymore with some of their printers.
Well, and I find this somewhat devious because if they were to allow it before,
And then your printer gets an automatic online firmware update that you may or may not be able to opt into, right?
And it could vary based on product or you might not even read.
It's, ah, well, maybe there's a security issue.
Printers are always leaky with security bugs and so on. But one of the things that they add is that you've been using third-party ink.
And then all of a sudden now, you can't print. print. Maybe you've got like a mission critical contract that needs to come out of that printer
that day and now all of a sudden you are shut down, you can't print. And part of the deviousness of
this is how, how can they do that? Because oftentimes there's a, uh, as I said, there's a
lot of electronics in the cartridge as well. It's not just a dummy thing. And so there has to be
to be some communication to the printer.
What if they put a little secret handshake in there? That they put it in the chips in the cartridges,
but never activated it in the printer in any way,
such that the third-party cartridges could get along just fine until HP decides one day to flip that switch,
to send the cartridge a particular code expecting a particular response back,
and when that is not given, well, it's not an authentic cartridge anymore,
and thereby you have been not giving us the money that we think that you should, and therein lies the frustration.
Initiating self-destruct sequence.
Boom! Well, and of course, they are trying to argue that the whole business model, that's the
Gillette business model, right?
You buy the printer for almost nothing and then they make the profits with ink, and sometimes
refill costs as much as an entire new printer with an entry level quarter filled cartridge or something.
And that of course kills their business model and they are trying to make money.
But they're not the only ones. And I had a Canon printer and I've got a brother one now that uses these refillable little
ink bottles that you just fill it in and so on.
And the Canon one that I had in the past, it would give me an error code saying that
the absorption pads that soak up all of the used ink, that they had been saturated.
And then now you need a new printer.
And no, then it put up a code that you had to call a service technician to deal with.
And the service technician call would have cost 80% the cost of a new printer.
But all I had to do was play some...
Button dancing on the print, like pressing certain buttons in a certain order, cleared the arrow,
printed perfectly fine for another eight months until the error came back. I had printed off that
button pattern, kept that stuck underneath the printer for when I needed to do it again,
did it, was fine again for another eight months or so. These companies are just frustrating.
I think, and by the way, we have a Canon laser printer here, a color laser, and as nice as
that is, it keeps reconfiguring its own network stuff periodically, so you end up with your
printer not being named Canon Laser anymore, but Canon Laser 2-4 colon 3-4, and it adds
on numbers and hex numbers and stuff at the end of the name and it turns really unwieldy and then
it doesn't work. I think the whole printer field, the whole printing field is ripe for disruption.
I want some white knight to write in and just swoop it all up and make it good and nice and
easy to... Anyway let's go on to the next topic. So this is for you okay there's a very bizarre
copyright case in Germany happened a few months ago. The link goes to a German article, throw
that into Deeple or Google Translate. And it's a photographer who shot a photo that he licensed to
a photo wallpaper manufacturer. Okay, so could be you, could be one of your soap bubbles or
or sky crystals or anything. So you license that to a manufacturer they make a wallpaper out of it.
Those were by the way very popular in the 70s here in Germany. I think they're making a comeback
right now. So big big print on the wall somewhere.
And an Airbnb host, I think, or a holiday home host, she put photos of her property on one of those Airbnb-like sites.
As you do. Like, you have to show what you're renting out.
And you shouldn't, in this case, be... I don't know whether you should or you shouldn't be concerned
about copyright issues in that regard. And that's what this case is about, right?
Well, what happened is one of the photos included that wallpaper in the background, right?
It was not the main thing, it wasn't framed up as a reproduction, it was just part of the room.
And the photographer saw it and sued her for copyright infringement.
She bought that wallpaper from a wallpaper manufacturer or from a store, put it on.
The photographer sued her for copyright infringement and won.
Is like, okay, so me as someone who might be, I don't know, I could be renting out something,
I could have artwork in the background, I could be in the same situation. It cost her, I think,
a thousand euros. And my gut feeling says, this is wrong. This... I honestly think that it...
That the agreement that the photographer signed with the wallpaper company, that's really
what this boils down to.
If that contract wasn't worded correctly and didn't have specific clauses within that.
Then the photographer could have the legal right to sue over that.
I'll give you an example here though.
I was reading a legal contract with a fairly large entity who's licensing one of my images.
And I'll read that there's a waiver section in there. I was doing this this morning before you even
sent me these stories.
And it says that the licensor waives all legal and equitable rights related to the liabilities,
claims, demands, actions, damages, and expenses,
including but not limited to claims for copyright or trademark infringement, defamation, right of publicity,
or any similar claim of action in tort, contract, or any other legal theory collectively claims
arising directly or indirectly from the licensee's use of the image and forever releases and discharges
the licensee from liability under such claims.
The licensee is the wallpaper manufacturer, right?
Ah, but... Or is the landlady buying a license from the wallpaper manufacturer who then licenses it
from the photographer?
This is... Nah, but when you get into these legal framework...
This is so removed from the actual photograph.
...was a whole sentence. It was a whole sentence.
And it says that you are waiving all legal claims arising directly or indirectly from
the use of the image. Okay? That's a statement.
So the use of the image, meaning the sale of the image, indirectly the appliance of
that wallpaper to the wall, is indirect of the original use of the image, which you are
not by this contract allowed to sue over, to have any claim in that regard.
This contract had that language. And so if that other one did not, then that would open up the door.
I haven't seen the contract, of course.
Now the interesting thing is that different courts here in Germany probably would have
handled this differently and the law here in Germany says that if it's an online thing,
it has to do with an online, it's online related as in she's advertising this thing online,
you as the photographer can choose what court this is being.
Trialed at. And of course what they did, they chose the court of Cologne which is
known to be very pro copyright in this case. Now they can appeal this measure
correct? They can, they could have raised it up to the next level court, they
They didn't because that would have been risky and financially not very good.
So they took it out of the court and they, I don't know what the term for it is, they
agreed on this payment.
Anyway, I'll give you a scenario here, Chris. This happens up occasionally to me.
I do reverse image searches to find where my work ends up online.
This is a very useful tool to discover people that are infringing on my rights, but sometimes
it gets some weird hits.
Earlier today, I discovered one of my images on somebody's wall, and I recognized it right away.
A large 70 by 40 inch canvas print that I had sold at an art festival years ago.
And it is showing up in the background in photographs published by a large company,
showing people gathering around that.
There's a couch in front of it and so on, and it's prominently placed in there.
I've also seen an image where somebody is in their office, hanging behind them is one of my prints,
and they are recording a motivational message being posted on LinkedIn.
Do these scenarios constitute copyright infringement?
So those are the actual photos, the actual prints you sold.
Those are not pictures ripped from online and self-printed. No, they legitimately purchased them. They purchased them.
Well, OK, then that comes down to the contract. What did they buy? There wasn't one.
It was just cash in one hand, artwork in the other, and an exchange.
And so in that scenario, I mean, do people know that they don't have a right to reproduce it?
And then technically taking pictures of it is reproducing it?
How semantic do you want to get about the law versus people that are technically also your paying customers at that same time?
And I guess it would boil down to whether or not the usage is commercial in any context.
Say, if somebody bought the print and then hung it in the front lobby of an office
and then is using it in all their promotional material and it's getting that type of commercial level exposure,
I think would be a different scenario here.
But again, I'm not a lawyer, per se.
And the courts decide these things unusually.
And of course, this is also very dependent on where you are,
because the whole law around copyright will be different in Germany, in Bulgaria,
in Canada, and so on.
Anyway, next up.
Samsung. I love this one. Okay, so I came across this. This has been over social media everywhere
and in photography circles. This is about Samsung and moon photography. So the S23 Ultra.
Is a mobile smartphone galaxy flagship flagship 1000x magnification it has a periscope lens in it
and and of course uh what what do people want to take photos of the moon because you cannot take
pictures of the moon normally with a with a smartphone because it gives you a black soup,
with a white overexposed dot in the middle now you can zoom in you can get the moon.
Filling the frame and the phone will do things for you. It'll notice oh this is a very far away object, it'll look at it and say oh that's the moon
and it will focus at the maximum distance at infinity, it'll set the
focus to infinity, it drops the exposure, it locks on the moon with a super stabilizer and so on and then you take a picture of the moon and
that is awesome and other phones have done that too. And there were always discussions around is there some fakery going on? Is there some weird... because the
moon shows us the same face more or less all the time. So you could very or
relatively easily have a database of moon photos in there and just swap them
out. You need some semantic analysis like okay oh this is the moon I recognize it
because I have an AI built in, and swap it out.
And that's the question. It was the question with other phones in the past.
And it's the question here again. So the link for this. Huawei did it before, right?
And now it's Samsung. I think Huawei did it, yeah. And those questions, there were people
who debunked the claims that they were faking it.
Lots of experiments. Of course, you don't really find out from the companies
themselves what exactly they do.
But MKBHD, Markus Brownlee, has released a video with some experiments.
He recreated some experiments that others have done. And here's how this experiment goes.
You put a photo of the moon on a computer screen across a couple of rooms,
far enough so the phone has to focus far away.
You've got like a big conference hall type thing. Like it's a big space.
Yeah, yeah, and you have it far away enough that the phone goes, oh, this is far away,
this is infinity and it recognizes it as the moon and then it gives you a very good picture of the moon.
So far so good off that screen, right? All the parameters are right.
But then what they did is they put a blurry photo of the moon on that screen.
And the phone did its thing. It says, oh, that must be the moon.
Let me set focus to infinity. Let me drop exposure. Let me lock on the stabilizer.
And it creates a sharp, in focus, detailed, correct image of the moon out of that blurry thing on screen.
Are you okay with this, Chris? No. Okay, so there's AI involved, AI is everywhere now, just for recognizing that that is the
moon, right?
There's some, it's not even pattern matching, it's more like some heuristics of sorts going on there.
And yeah, that's one of those use cases. I don't know if there's others, but it seems from the outside that there is some weird
reconstruction fakery going on here?
Fakery is the thing that I'd like to focus on here too, because the thing is, the moon is the moon.
I photographed the moon. Chris, I'm sure you photographed the moon.
Pretty sure every photographer at one point or another has pointed their camera at that
big white circle in the sky at night.
Speak for yourself. Of course, everyone does. I think I can speak for everybody at this point.
But the idea is that, OK, everybody wants a great picture of the moon.
When you take a picture of the moon with this particular device, it's no longer your picture of the moon.
It is a picture of the moon, and I don't feel like I'd be able to take any sort of ownership
of the resulting data that it creates.
But on the other side of things, how many layers go into a LIDAR-assisted iPhone photograph
with so much different massaging of pixels and information to smooth this, to enhance that.
And then the end result though, and I think this is the key difference, is that that's my picture.
Regardless of what has been massaged and supported by the software in that magic box I call a
smartphone, it's doing it to my image, to my scene specifically, in a non-unique, non-repeatable way.
And that I think I'm okay with to some degree. I mean it all depends on the
context and the subject. But when you're just blanket replacing data with
something that you think should be there that isn't, then yeah I don't think I'm
okay with that either. We could go even further and say okay what happens if someone makes that picture into some, I don't know, a print that
they sell, a book that they sell, and then Samsung goes after them for copyright infringement. Oh, that would be devious. I think that would be...
Samsung would be roasted in the court of public opinion before anything would get to the court of law. Or maybe the photographer who provided
Samsung with those photos... Now we could... This is getting salacious. Layers all the way
down. But okay, we are talking amongst photographers here, right? My mother.
Who's really good with technology, she uses the internet every day and so on.
She uses her smartphone, takes great photos with it. Would she think the same? Or would she be so
happy that she can now take pictures of the moon? I don't think she would really care how this photo
came to be. I think, I don't know, if my mom were to take, if she had this phone, take a picture of
of the moon and she would say, Don, you should have seen the moon last night here.
I took a picture of you. I'm going to send it to you on whatever platform.
Would you have a heart to tell her that's fake?
No, you wouldn't. I might.
It depends on the mood. It depends on how happy she is that she took that photo of the moon.
I don't want to rain on anybody's parade.
If ignorance can be bliss in that moment, then maybe it should be.
But that is also part of the problem, that people think they're getting a version of
reality that isn't there.
And agree. I draw the line differently when it's a unique subject.
You know, a photo of my family, a photo of the hiking path that I'm on, and there could
be a beautiful sunset or what have you.
Yes, enhance, enhance. Make it feel like I had a professional camera and I was pressing all the knobs and dials
and buttons without me actually having to do so.
The whole topic of enhance that is here now, we have this with AI.
You can now give a very blurry photo of a bird into an AI and it'll reconstruct the
feathers and the details, not exactly as the original photo was, but close enough that,
it will work in most contexts.
Enhance. Last topic is AI related. And this goes a bit outside of photography, but I thought it was worth mentioning because we are recording this on March the 15th.
Yesterday, March the 14th, was an interesting day in AI. So we've had the image generators and the GPT3s
and the different, well, these are
the two most known and accessible use cases right now.
And yesterday was the announcement of GPT4. Not just the announcement, it is now available.
People can get their hands on it. I had no idea it had iterated that fast to be version 4 already.
Yes. So GPT-4 was demoed yesterday. It's a large language model.
It is text-based. It's now in the hands of paying plus customers, subscribers,
to add GPT-Plus, which is like $20 a month.
There will be soon AI access, so people will build services on top of that.
And it can program, often in one shot. There's an example I found online.
Someone used it to program Pong and Breakout, the two computer games, each within 60 seconds.
Oof. That's impressive. But for me... It's scary. It's scary.
It's scary, not what it can do right now, but how quickly it's gotten to this point from not existing.
This is an exponential growth right now. They have improved what they call the number of tokens to 32,000, which is like if you
use spoken content, let's say this podcast, to throw the text in there, that would be about
three hours of spoken content, which used to be so much shorter up to now. They showed,
and this is interesting, they showed a demo with its image processing capabilities, because it will
have image processing capabilities it can understand photos and not just
in a oh there's a cat on this photo no this cat is sitting on top of a green garbage can that has Smurf stickers on it.
Or there's you know what I think this is going to be great for Chris is let's say you go and you get an x-ray or an MRI done and your doctor gives you an opinion that's already have an upload that data to chat GPT and it will give you a second opinion you can tell him what the first doctor said and you could say don't say that tell me anything else this could possibly be and this I mean as you said this type of thing is already happening
Well, in Europe, a year, one or two years ago,
Europe officially approved use of AI in lung X-rays,
thorax X-rays.
So those X-rays are now not being looked at by people unless the AI thinks, oh, this should be looked at.
But like 95% of those are, there's nothing on them, and the AI will just filter them out and say, yep, fine, fine, fine.
So those specialists can concentrate on the really hard cases.
Or you can save money by not hiring as many specialists, of course.
So what else did they do? They showed the image processing demo.
Like someone scribbled a webpage thing in a notebook.
With bad handwriting and a few boxes and this goes here and here's a button and so on.
And that thing created the web page with HTML, with CSS, with JavaScript, based on that napkin
kind of scribble. It scores 1410 out of 1600 in the SAT. That makes it competitive for good colleges.
This. Wow.
Um, so I think that when, when we look back, once the singularity has happened, we'll realize
that it was already happening right now.
I think we are, we're not 10 years away. We are under a year away.
This is what it feels like right now.
And it, it does create some anxiety in some people.
So, um, I could imagine, you know, if you were a, a crime scene sketch artist, a criminal
sketch artist, you don't have a job anymore. Of course. All of this stuff has completely replaced you.
I have recently started looking into what is the value in photography?
How do we, what is, what makes photography value for whom?
As in, will this job be taken by an AI? And there's this, not to go too deep into it,
I've talked about extensively on the Future of Photography and on other podcasts, but the value,
There's this whole commercial side of photography where you have a client-supplier relationship.
You are the supplier as a photographer. The client needs some value because they want to have a photo to sell something.
For example, there's a pool of suppliers they can choose from and they will...
The product photography is going away because now there are already websites where you train
the AI on your product.
Some smartphone photos from different angles and it'll be able to place it in the Sahara
desert or in the Arctic with a click of a button. That is happening. That will go away.
Stock photography will go away. Photogrammetry of like just taking smartphone pictures, I remember that being a thing almost
10 years ago. And that was in its infancy then.
Photogrammetry is now being replaced by NERFs, Neural Radiance Fields, which are better,
taken over. So anyway, that kind of photography is gone. There's of course the entire field
of documentary photography, which is going to stay because you want to document something.
You cannot fake, create a documentary photo. Well, you can fake it. It's unethical to fake it.
But in which case do you want? Because then there's the other side of the spectrum, which
is the personal photography. This is your holiday snaps, your wedding, your whatever.
Are a grey area between commercial and documentary.
And there the value comes from what is in the photo, the memory that's depicted, the
people that are depicted. And if you would train an AI on the couple at a wedding and create their wedding photos
in the Caribbean.
That would not have as much value as the actual photo at home because it's not a real photo.
How about this? How about if we bridge the gap here a little bit?
What if you hired an absolutely atrociously horrible wedding photographer?
Their pictures are worse than using the original Canon Rebel in 2023 with the kit lens and
everything on automatic.
It is just spitting out garbage and the person has no talent whatsoever.
It's not even technically high resolution or high quality.
But could you then, and shame on you for hiring that photographer, you should do better research,
but let's say you're in this scenario.
What if you could feed those images into an AI that would generate skillfully crafted
scenes with the same people in the same position, much better lighting, much more flair and
drama and an artistry that the artist was lacking to begin with.
Let me put this in a more devious scenario. You are the photographer.
You know you aren't a good photographer. You take those pictures, you do all the theatrics you need to do so people believe that you're
a good photographer.
You have the right looking camera, you look the job, you come home with garbage photos,
you feed them in the eye, and all you deliver is doctored photos.
As long as they do not see situations that haven't happened, that they are positive didn't
they would probably be very happy about the great photos that that wonderful
photographer took of them and would recommend them even so. Yeah that's the
future I think that that if it's not happening within the next year it will
be everywhere in the next five. Anyway GPT-4 announced yesterday, Google announced yesterday they want to bring Palm their pathways language model this.
Of competition to GPT-4, to Google Docs and Gmail and other stuff they have online.
There will also be an API. Yesterday was a big API announcement day from different companies, all gearing towards becoming
our overlords.
In photography I see a few good uses for that. For example, it's not yet in there, but it will be in there.
They demonstrated the image recognition. You could have automated captions, descriptions.
Accessibility would be skyrocketing because every photo would have a good caption, not
just a few words that someone typed up to not have to do more.
There's a company they partner with, BeMyEyes.com, which now has a GPT-4, they had access, they
early access a GPT-4 powered app for blind people?
Point it at something and it'll tell you what's there. It is happening. It's already happening.
BeMyEyes.com. You could even go and have, I don't know, photo edit suggestions and maybe even
chain that up with something that then edits the photo. Like we already have some of that.
We throw in bad photos and get something artificially intelligently enhanced.
We could, well, many different things, a shot list,
let's generate a shot list for this thing and so on. There's like a million different ways
you could use these things in photography if you will still be doing actual photography. So, hmm.
AI. It's hard to say, you know, I think photography as an art form will always exist.
I mean, it's whether or not it remains in the hands of hobbyists or professionals.
And I think that the number of professional photographers, and we've seen this for years, even before this AI revolution.
I mean, how many newspapers actually have a staff photographer anymore?
Maybe they have one, and that's it, where there used to be an entire department,
for that particular purpose.
That's all gone away. And these professional photography jobs are continuing to decline.
This is going to be another nail in that particular coffin.
But I think that the hobbyist environment will always be there.
And I think the value that anybody who has an interest in photography is partly in the genuineness of what
they are capturing about the world around them.
And there's no substitute for that.
I'm with you there. We are seeing a democratization of things here,
as we've seen before. Publishing went entirely from the big pro houses to desktops.
Radio has been disrupted by podcasting. Commerce has gone online, so brick and mortar isn't as
important as it used to be and so on. And photography will, I believe there will be,
more value for some circles, more value being placed on actual photography, on real photography
because it's human made, it's unique. It's the same that you see kids now.
Flocking to instax, Fuji instax because it's unique, it's handmade, it's one of a kind.
Analog. Yeah, analog and niche. It's another niche forming here, but that niche, my daughter
who's seven loves the Polaroid go that we have. And it's sort of like the Fujian stacks. And,
I had some film in it that was pretty much expired. Only a couple of the frames,
had turned out and she was so excited when we were in a technology store recently. And she
pointed to it and she said, Daddy, we can get more film. And I look at the price of
the film and I'm like, not today. So we're gonna wait a while. So are our jobs in danger?
Well, the, the, the, the...
The thing I heard recently, and I don't know who said it, but I'm using it here, is your job will not be taken by an AI.
Your job will be taken by a photographer using AI.
We're still here to handhold the AI. I heard somebody say that about law as well, you know, as a lawyer.
Lawyers will be disrupted big time, of course. There is a law firm that uses AI and that is now trying to get that to legally be able
to appear in front of judges and argue cases.
Oh, what about an AI judge? How about that?
Oh yeah, and then we'll be out at the beach while they fight things out for us.
So what a future. Hey, Don, thank you so much for coming on Tips from the Top Floor.
I want you back.
And yeah. Happy to be back on any time. I mean, we're only one hour time difference apart now.
Yay. Makes things so much easier. OK, Don. Where will people go if they want
to find out more about you?
You can go to doncom.ca. Actually, doncom.bg also works.
D-O-N-K-O-M dot B-G, let's say.
That just redirects to my website, as it already is. But you'll find the links to my social media stuff there.
I'm pretty active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr, although I really dislike the meta platforms.
There's still a big audience there, so I hang around. But hey, send me an email.
You want to talk about anything?
Are you on Mastodon? Tell me you're on Mastodon. Not yet. I am not on Mastodon.
Chris, are you going to be the one that finally twists my arm hard enough to get me on Mastodon? I will do this offline but yes yes you need to go. Okay.
All right, Don, thank you so much and take care.
Music.
That was it for today. Thank you so much for listening, thanks for subscribing, thanks for
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And again a reminder the Eastern European Electric Photo Road Trip in September is over
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villages. It's a unique 10-day experience full of beauty and rich history and culture.
Go to discoverthetopfloor.com to find out more. Discoverthetopfloor.com.
And now go out and take amazing photos.
Be nice to each other.
Music.