Justfolk's photos

Just because I was asked to post some more of them, here is a pair of AI images produced as a result of a single "prompt." In this case, I asked the machine to show me pictures of workers in a lunchroom with beer and a red flag behind them. It gave me the beer but the red flag got transformed into uniform work shirts. The pictures, almost a panoramic diptych, have problems, but our natural pareidolia tends to iron some of them out. Thus I see stories encoded in the image, an image that being AI is essentially nonsense in origin. But meaning is brought by the viewer, hey? So the brunet guy in the left picture is seen as someone lovestruck. And the girl at left seems engrossed in some emotion with regard to the man in blue who seems to be considering it. However, my pareidolia (I don't know about yours) can't do much of anything about that booted leg sticking out from the table in the right picture; it's handy for the front guy to lean on. They all have a kind of heroic style; that's the stereotyping by the AI machine doing that. The overall colour tone is like a 1965 CocaCola ad, and I suspect that that kind of commercial art (a sort of mid-century American socialist realism) forms a large part of the source imagery being used by the machine here.

Stone's Cove is a resettled community in Fortune Bay, on the South Coast of Newfoundland. Sixty or seventy years ago, it had a thriving population of over three hundred people. Now there is almost nothing -- a wharf and a shed, and the foundations of several of the larger buildings, surrounded by overgrown leftover plants from the people's gardens. And on the beach is to be found a great deal of what people nowadays call beach glass -- pretty shards of broken glass, ground by the weather and by the stones and sand into hazy bright and smooth bits of glass. Local jewelry makers love to find the stuff and it is only on the rather more isolated beaches it can still be found. Like that in Stone's Cove, where we were last week. This evening, waiting for me to bring her supper, my wife stacked these found pieces. And after supper, waiting for the tea to steep, I shone a flashlight on them and took their picture.

I've been fascinated for some time by what's happening in AI. Today I started playing with one of the AI image generators. I got dragged into a couple-of-hours-deep hole of giving "prompts" and seeing what I get back. Many pictures are very amusing, even endearing. I suspect the computers' source pictures are not ordinary snapshots, but rather professional images, thus selected for emotional content. As the meme goes, we have to stop calling it AI Art and start calling it sophisticated plagiarism. Nonetheless, there are surprising images. The prompt I gave for this picture was something like "1950s style, Diane Arbus style, b&w, old men and women smoking hashish and laughing." This is basically what I got (I did do some trimming and framing, and a small amount of "curves adjustment"). It's not photography as we have known it.

The view the other morning of Harbour Mille from the ferry boat coming in to Bay L'Argent, Fortune Bay.

There is a way out.

We discovered this guy perched in our stairwell this afternoon. Five hours later, he hasn't opened his wings or otherwise moved. His perch is right next to a bright orange painting that matches the colours he would flash if he did open the wings. He is too high for us to reach and capture him safely, so he'll stay until he gets tired of it.

It's a thing now. Garlicbragging. I'm into it.

I never noticed a warbler for the first two-thirds of a century of my life. But in the past few years, at this time of year, I keep seeing them. I like the change.

English speakers in much of Fortune Bay have what linguists call "non-phonemic H" which means that the H-sound comes and goes according to rules that have little to do with spelling, and more to do with prosody, style, humour and so on. It's not truly "H-lessness" but rather that H's are a tool for speakers that does not exist for speakers of Standard English. Thus the words oar and whore can be, though don't have to be, homonyms. I expect the owner of this boat knew what he (or she) was doing in naming it. And my friend Gerry appreciated the joke, extending it a little by taking a cellphone picture with the local Anglican church looming over the boat's name.

It was still fairly early this morning. We'd left Rencontre just before 7:00 am on the MV Terra Nova and, ninety minutes later, we were just about to slew right to come into Bay L'Argent. This was the view ahead.

Moss growing on a window frame.

I was testing my new camera's ability to take pictures of stars when I saw a more interesting sight next door. (The little bright light in the upper right is a tiny fragment of the Moon, behind heavily leafed trees.)

He's happy to hang out with us as long as we feed him when he calls. And he's happy to wait off to the side for the crows or even the flicker -- they get first dibs on the peanuts if they want it. But he brooks no competition from the juncos and they don't ask questions, just shuffle off to the side themselves.

Today it is dry, after some real deluges in the past few days, but we're getting the northerly flow of one or another of those large weather systems in the Atlantic. So it's just ten degrees, a little cold for most flying insects, including this White underwing moth. He perched this morning on the pulley of our clothesline and he's been there for five or six hours, so far.

These twenty-five garlics (plus two more I pulled a week ago) came from the twenty-seven tiny cloves I took from two heads of Purple Stripe garlic and planted last fall. I didn't expect much from them but every one came up and produced a good head. I'll be saving at least a couple to plant in a couple of months.

This time of year I regularly see three varieties of Linaria in bloom, feeding bumblebees. This is the old-fashioned one, the only one I remember from my childhood when we would pick the flowers out, bite off the point, and suck the "honey" from the horn. Thus we called it Honeysuckle. I was an adult before I started hearing people call it Butter-and-eggs, though I know now it's a widespread name. And then I heard people calling it Toadflax. I still think of it as Honeysuckle. And, yeah, I know that name, Honeysuckle, is used for some other plants. This is the Yellow toadflax. Another variety is very bluish though more white than blue. And a third appears to be a cross between the two. I never noticed either of the two non-yellow varieties until I was in my fifties. This was this afternoon and the late summer sun was getting lower in the sky.

When my wife gave me a couple of books about warblers late last year I said to her something along the lines of "I hope I see an American redstart." I had never seen one, but each summer we get a motley band of warblers in our neighbourhood, so there was a good chance. And yesterday this one showed up with the other warblers. Not the dazzling show-off the adult males are, but a redstart nonetheless. I don't know if it's a female adult or a juvenile. (Apparently the young birds all look like the adult females.) I've been counting the bird species seen from our back door. this is Number Forty-Five.

Okay okay I didn't focus on the moon. I know. But this is what's up above our garden this evening.