I’ve mostly ignored the accessibility of AI imaging lately because I haven’t cared. The news a few weeks back of a guy winning a photography contest with an AI-generated image to force the question ‘is AI photography'?’ seems a bit silly but triggered a series of conclusions I’ve found curious.
So AI isn’t photography, but it’s certainly something, illustration ? Which is kind of what a lot of photography is now, moving around pieces of things on a computer.
I’ve been failing to learn Blender, a 3-D modeling app for some time now, to use it to render lighting on objects and people before I actually have to set up equipment and involve people.
So I asked some friends ‘I’m tired of seeing all these dumb AI photos, I wish someone would make an app to do 3D modeling for photography’ and I received something really compelling. An app called Set A Light 3D by German company Elixxier.
Spending a few hours with this software, I’m really impressed with how specific it is to photography—you choose the camera and focal length, choose from a list of familiar lights and modifiers. It kind of does everything I hoped something like this would. The amount of detail you can pose the models is incredible, down to pitch and angle of individual fingers. The clothing is very funny and feels very German. The end result is an image to be used as a reference for a real-life photoshoot, and while I really like the resulting images, they are just a piece of the process.
What is funny to me is how the tropes of popular photography have wiggled their way into this app. The beautiful woman on a car in a bathing suit against a blue beach background. Yes I made this but all of these things are available in the software. And I found myself understanding how this could be photography. Seeing as how insane this fantasy image came out, I thought maybe more grounding would be to reengineer some photos that I’ve already taken.
I find it incredibly suspicious the AI guy is German, that this app is German, and some of the best words in photography come out of Germany (Leica, Contax, Zeiss). I’ve been a bit of a Germanophile lately, reading about and buying lots of German wine, spending time on DuoLingo and listening to German learning podcasts while driving. So you can say all of this comes at a very very strange time for me.
I have a list of dream images I want to make someday that maybe sketching out via AI would be helpful before money is spent and equipment is carried and call sheets are sent but for now I’m more curious about the feedback loop of using software to emulate what photography has already done. As a kid my parents had two large opposing mirrors in their bathroom “infinity mirror” where you get caught between them and the compounding reflections look like a long spiraling hallway of mirrors and I spent hours trying to solve that so I’m excited to get to the bottom of all of this.
Tschüss!
This is incredible content. Would happily read more of this! Need to try Set a Light!