10 Things you Can't Do with a Smartphone

This was the final image seen in the movie, "The Shining".  It was taken with something called a Banquet Camera.  Read on for why I'm even showing this to you.

Also in this Issue:

• 10 Things You Can't Do with a Smartphone
• Sony A7R V - Little-Discussed Features of Note (youtube video)
• Announcements / Next Time in Cameracraft Magazine
• Adding Detail to Old Photos

10 Things You Can’t Do with a Smartphone

Smartphones are taking over, and the gap in image quality continues to shrink.  (See my lecture about Computational Photography given to the Royal Photographic Society for more on this topic.)  But there are still areas where the big cameras are essential.  Below is a short list (click on any image to view larger and sharper):

1.  Olympic Sports / Nature Photography / Horseback Riding

This is the first example most people think of.  Anything requiring a telephoto lens and subject tracking will remain the domain of mirrorless cameras (and to some extent DSLRs, although the mirrorless camera bodies have eclipsed the DSLR's legendary tracking abilities).

Geeking with Gary - More AI Pontifications (and why Humans will Need a Label)

In This Edition:

• Can ChatGPT write code?
• Humans need a Label

Can ChatGPT write code?

Continuing on last month's sermon about these new "AI" machine learning tools used to generate images, I also thought I'd give ChatGPT a chance to help me with a programming need.  I had a folder with 500 images in it of various sizes and formats, and wanted to shrink just some of them and save them to a different directory using the original file type.  You can't use Photoshop actions for this because it lacks the ability to do an "IF - THEN".

So I asked this question of ChatGPT and my jaw dropped when I saw its response: 

AI: The Alarmists are Worried about the Wrong Thing

AI-generated imagery from the series "Poverty's Got Talent" by Lulian Barbulescu

(Click on any image to view larger and sharper.)

Last month I took a deep dive into the emerging field of AI Image Generation tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 for an article in Cameracraft Magazine.  (Here's a downloadable copy of that issue.  You're welcome. :-) )  At the end of the article I concluded that these tools are in their infancy, and the following things need to be fixed before they can be truly useful: