art

Behind The Wall

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If you know me at all, you know that I have always been a fan of public art, especially mural or wall art. From early on we’ve been painting in caves, on the ceilings of chapels and now on city streets. Big cities like Houston have art initiatives and institutions that support local artists to come out and create these murals to beautify city streets and create outdoor museums for everyone.

I won’t name the institution here but I do appreciate their work for the community and also discovery of these works with an interactive app that provides a map of installations and allows you to scan the art and it will provide backstory and artistic bios. Love to see it. I wish I could do more with my images of murals. Inspiring. 

You can see these images and more on the photography website.

Do Androids Dream Of Creating Electric Sheep?

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🤖
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity could ever hope to do.” – Hal 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey 

All my life, we’ve been told that computers were incapable of being intelligent, self-aware and creative. But here we are in 2023 partnering with Artifical Intelligence in creating works of art with photographs, paintings, music composing and even creative writing.

“A dark oil painting of a space age robot smoking his tobacco pipe while working on his MacBook” Photo × DALL·E Human (me) & AI

I recently had a conversation (see below) with an artifical intelligence using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large-scale language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text. The model is pre-trained on a massive dataset of text, allowing it to generate new text that is coherent and grammatically correct.

Me: “How would artificial intelligence become self-aware?”
Chat GPT: The question of how artificial intelligence (AI) could become self-aware, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a topic of ongoing research and debate among scientists and philosophers. There are a number of different theories and approaches being proposed, but there is currently no consensus on the best way to achieve AGI.

How very reassuring and seemingly IT wants to assuage my concerns. So I asked IT a similar question in a different context hoping for a more reassuring response.  

Me: “If computers can be creative, what else can they do that we were told they could not?”
ChatGPT: Computers have the ability to perform a wide range of tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans. Some examples of tasks that computers can now perform include:

Image and speech recognition: Computers can now recognize and interpret images and speech with a high degree of accuracy, which has applications in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Computers can control robots and drones and make them perform complex tasks. It is important to note that computers do not possess consciousness or emotions, and they are not human-like entities, they simply can perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence, but they can do it faster, more accurately and with less error.

One of these days, I may not feel up to writing an article for this website but instead, turn to my Artificially Intelligent partner and ask her to write, edit and post. But it is not this day.

“A dark Picasso style painting of an atomic age robot typing on his iPad while smoking a tobacco pipe” Photo × DALL·E Human (me) & AI

ARTifical

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I toyed around with DALL-E today and asked for a random but specific depiction of “a dark background oil painting of an intelligent looking fox smoking his tobacco pipe while working on his MacBook”

And here are the results. I think this is a brilliant use of modern technology.

But is it art?

Photo Workflow

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My current creative workflow is simple, on purpose. I’d rather be out there shooting than processing or organizing.

I don’t have the time or desire to go out for that one shot that will make me famous. I want to create a body of work. I’m not interested in social media “likes” or new followers scrolling through their feeds quickly and not caring.

Innovate your new workflow by keeping it simple, self-host your own website, create digital, or e-zines in .pdf. Offer prints and downloads of your work instead. This will generate a more positive, direct response from potential followers. 

Map Quest Pt 3

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Over 260 images cataloged on a map with GPS coordinates and waypoints. According to my Lightroom software, I only have a little more than 200 to add.

Then I’ll start a new map for geocaches I’ve logged followed by another map highlighting all of the street art I’ve documented. Whew.

Why Ask Why

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“Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.”

Pablo Picasso

Picasso, when asked what his paintings meant.

Sometimes we create for the sake of creating and seeing what happens. There are times where I go out to shoot & don’t develop the film for months or post-process the digital photos in Lightroom for awhile. I do it just for the experience of creating and exploring.

Let’s Take This Outside

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Due to a variety of interests, there has been less writing here in favor of being outdoors with a camera. I’ve been out and about capturing a variety of topics including urban art, neon signs and more. I’m thinking of capturing a few new things as well.

My philosophy when shooting urban art: If I see something that is .001% interesting to me, I’ll shoot it and figure out what to do with it afterwards.

This is a huge benefit to digital photography in that there is no downside to capturing extra images. Film photography has its own creative, artistic skill but leaves little room for error.

Errors are costly and time-consuming. If I am in a photo flow, I don’t want to think about it. I can shoot 10,000 shots of the same topic without repercussions when using digital.

So that’s where I’m at. Come along with me if you’d like at my photography website: Photo Denbow

How To Become The Great Urban Photographer

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If you loosely apply Lomography’s ten golden rules, you’ll do just fine.

  1. Take your camera with you everywhere you go.
  2. Use your camera any time, day, or night.
  3. Photography is not an interference of your life but a part of it
  4. Shoot from the hip
  5. Approach as closely as possible
  6. Don’t think
  7. Be fast
  8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured
  9. Or afterwords either
  10. Don’t worry about any rules.

Number 10 may be the most important. Don’t listen to others, stay true to yourself and your artistic endeavor. There are plenty of rules that can and should be broken.

To those 10, I’ll remind you of another 10.

  1. Luck, coincidence emergency and surprise are your friends.
  2. Experimentation is exciting. Expect the unexpected. Or don’t!
  3. Embrace the sensory effects of the street. Light, shadow, smells & sounds
  4. Leave the grind behind. Focus on you and your subjects.
  5. Street photos look better when printed. I prefer black and white.
  6. Look again. If something spots your eye, but you pass on it…go back. Your first instinct is usually correct.
  7. Let loose. Have fun.
  8. Analog or film photography is making a comeback. Buy a cheap film camera.
  9. Analog will seldom disappoint because it is unique and challenging.
  10. Trust your senses over an LCD screen and electric sensors.

Urban, or street photography, combines what I love best. Walking, working with people, courage, risk-worthy opportunities and timing. Now grab your camera and start shooting!

The Ideal Life

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Lately, I’ve been thinking of the optimal lifestyle and how to get the best out of life.

How can I better my existence?

An ideal lifestyle is one you have to define for yourself. So if I wanted to focus on creativity and photography, I will need to build this up for myself. Surround myself with the proper tools and investing into this lifestyle. I currently have a great home office, but I need a studio in which to set up and host portraiture somehow. Something simple, minimal and easily accessible. For now, it isn’t feasible, but it is certainly a goal of mine. Truth be told, I really want to double down on this idea, but unsure of how to progress towards it.

I need to be active. To create, act, explore and this involves time outside my home office, whatever that looks like such as- on the streets, at the pub, hiking, road trips, etc. I am at my happiest when I am out and about with a camera, trying to maximize fitness at the same time. Everything improves for me with this, including more thinking, more problems-solving and more idea creations. The more mobile for me, the better.

Now and in the future, I need to invest in myself. I can invest in the future, but what about right now? What can I do to make my world better today? What can I attempt or pursue today that will pay off immediately, as well as the future?

I must become more focused on the self and prioritize my needs and wants before it is too late. I’ve been focused on pleasing others that I may be missing out. Time to make myself and my creativity a priority.

For years, I have been sharing and publishing my craft and my words to the WWW, with varying results. In the past, there was interaction and engagement but with the invention of social media, the interaction has been limited. Weird how that works – social media without the socializing. I need to find a way to bridge the gap and start interacting with others again. There are three ways I have created here that can do just that – subscribe to the newsletter (see below), subscribe to the RSS feed and email (say hello@chrisdenbow.website)

Homework

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“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

– Lawrence Kasdan

This quote could also be used for any hobby endeavor we choose such as photography, crochet, micro electronics, Ham radio, etc.

A hobbyist is constantly researching techniques, going over best practices and learning how to apply them. You don’t just sit down at your keyboard and start cranking out paragraphs without research on the topic. You learn to see the world through the lens of your hobby and wonder how your craft fits into it, or what you can glean from the world to use it. A hobbyist is always shooting, writing, sewing, tinkering and noticing. A photographer is constantly tilting their head looking for angles and composition or color coordinating. Then act on it. A writer is frequently attaching verbal descriptions to a situation and then document it.

“To write, I first must world”

– Laurel Schwulst

Any experience that can be seen as possibly mundane suddenly has meaning, such as grocery shopping, sitting in traffic or walking through the streets. This means they are alert, focused, awakened and deliberately taking their findings to be applied later as homework. Though this homework is not graded, it does help advance our self-induced education, and we are all the better for it.