Showing posts with label shadow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shadow. Show all posts

Sunday, July 6, 2025

From the sketchbooks

 




I would describe these as mixed results. Sometimes my little AI's can do amazing things, but sometimes they are not entirely up to the task. And sometimes, to my bitter disappointment, they can't do it at all. For instance I spent hours trying to get a t-shirt graphic of a person, eventually my cartoon character, craning his head around to take a bite of a taco, while the carefully assembled taco was held perfect and horizontal and undisturbed at the center of the image. And the title would say: "The taco does not come to you. You go to the taco."

Was this idea so appealing that I would spend hours trying to get an image of a person craning their head around to eat a taco?

Perhaps sadly, yes.

Did I succeed?

Certainly sadly, no.

I could ask this AI to write a poigniant novella in Russian about an obscure blogger and it could probably do it. But someone eating a taco? No.

This idea today I have been working on for a couple of weeks. I call them sketchbook pictures. I'm not totally satisfied, or maybe I haven't gotten to just the right application of it yet. But unlike the person eating a taco pictures, I at least have some things serviceable enough to show you, and plenty of them.







































































































































































































































































































































































































Saturday, June 28, 2025

Shadow Falls Creek with my Peanuts camera

 




I went out for one of my morning photography walks this morning and grabbed the first camera I could find when I was leaving. It was my Peanuts Camera.





My Peanuts Camera (no, it's not 'cheap', it takes pictures in the style of a Peanuts Cartoon strip), is not as colorful as some of my other cameras, or dramatic, but I feel it nicely conveys the simple peacefulness of the woods I walk in. Because of where I live, it is sweet to think that it is likely that Charles Schulz walked among these same views 75 or 100 years ago. If he drew them I think he would have done a nicer job of it than these, but perhaps these give a bit of his flavor...


























































































































































































































































Sunday, May 25, 2025

Castles in my stream

 




The last time we visited the short and wonderful Shadow Falls Creek and its attendant bluffs along the Mississippi River, we saw me kayaking in it. 



Today we take a more bucolic approach, and we explore its ruins, villages, and dwellings.