* Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #957 / Revived #177 on 2026 08 19 *

Welcome to the Wednesday Comments and Critique (No Theme & No Brand) thread!

We are dedicated to continuing the great tradition of this C&C thread because we are convinced that looking at, and talking about images is vital for better photography.

Our tried and tested concept (18 years and running!) is a weekly "peer-to-peer" photo comments & critique encounter, in which you GIVE and RECEIVE.

The idea is simple: you post a photo or photo-based image that you have made and get critique on it. And in return you give other people your honest but constructive opinion of their images.

Any Theme, Any Camera, Any Style, Any Subject.

We are still figuring out how to create the convenience of threaded view on this new forum.
For now, let us agree that you post an image or essay with a title and short explanation, and that all comments include the image as a quote.
Replies to comments may or may not include quotes.

THREAD GUIDELINES – THE SHORT & SWEET VERSION
• This thread does not care about camera brands (or even smart phone brands). It’s not about the tool, but the image.

• Post one image or essay that you have made and would like to get comments on.
An entry can either be a single image or a short essay. With an essay we mean not a collection of random images without any connection, seeking C&C on more than one of them. We mean instead a limited number (3 to 10) of connected images that together try to tell a story, create a fuller picture of a situation, event or location, etc.

• Add a clear title to your post to distinguish your entry.

• Look at the other images/essays and give your comments on at least one of those.

• For comments, try to go beyond a simple pat on the back or a short dismissal.

• Do you like an image (or essay) ? Try to explain WHY it appeals to you.

• Negative or critical feedback is OK (we all want to learn), but be polite and constructive. Try to explain why the image (or essay) does not appeal to you and how it might be improved.

• Please stay on topic, i.e. concentrate on the image and the photographic comments, without getting into politics or other distractions. No non-photographic arguments.

The critique you give is vital.

What was your first impression?
What catches your eye about an image?
Why?

What do you like, and what distracts you?
What would you change?

Fiddle with the image in your head - composition, perspective, color balance, exposure.

PLEASE NOTE CLEARLY:

Unless the original poster specifically states (for every individual posting offered for C&C) that they do not want their image(s) to be downloaded, altered or reposted, it is understood that within the context of this thread, other participants are free to download and alter the posted image and repost it in a reply for C&C purposes. That reposted image may remain permanently within the week's thread, or you may remove it after a short period of time if you prefer. The downloaded and altered images are not to be used for any other purposes nor uploaded anywhere else than within the context of the C&C in this thread. No copyright disputes here!

Encourage - it is a scary business putting your work up for other people to judge!

More general feedback is also welcome.

Do you know something about taking the same sort of image that would make matters easier - share your own as an example in your reply.

Have fun, be respectful and let’s stick together!

PARATY SUNRISE

Once more an image from our travels in Brazil (from which we have just returned home yesterday night).

This is in Paraty, around sunrise:

(Iphone 11 image, with some contrast and clarity adjustments on the phone)

The Perseid meteor shower

Maybe you saw them last week too?
The Perseids come every year, and it's worth staying up to see the show and make a wish or two.

I drove up to just below the Hochkönig mountain range and set up the tripod and waited.
I'm not an expert at astrophotography but it's nice to have a try.
I set the camera to take multiple shots, and as you can imagine, the best and biggest and most impressive meteors came in the short intervals between those exposures :-)
Anyway, still managed to capture a few.
The lens used was the Viltrox 16mm F1.8 on the Nikon Z7 and processed with ACDSee.
It's great how the trail looks green, as their tiny metalic dust particles and the air ionise.

If you look closely, you can see the Milky Way, a meteor or two, a blinking aeroplane, some satellites, lots of stars and even a distant elliptical galaxy.
Posted here in full resolution.

Four-legged bird

Amazing, well caught 😂

That is a really cool and funny animal image.
You caught JUST the right moment to create the illusion.

Could well be entered into one of those competitions for funny animal shots.

I see that you have uploaded the image twice (and with a slightly different file name, with one including "AI" in the title.
But I actually don't see much difference at first glance, apart from the impression that the greens look a bit more vivid maybe...
(Side-by-side comparison might be better than scrolling up and down between them).
Can you explain the reason for the double image?

Funny image. Good catch. On the second image we can see top of the second bird plumage and some feathers between two pairs of legs. These are not present on the first image which apperantly has been cleaned. Also the name of the second image contains AI. What is a purpose of posting second image?

One of a pair.

In the bull's eye

Alright now I see the differences. They were too subtle on my small screen.
Indeed it seems that AI was used to make the illusion more "perfect" by cleaning away some hints of the second bird behind the first.

In order to give my idea of an answer to Sagitarius' question :
I really like that Kumsal shows us the original, as well as the modifications.
It helps us understand (and appreciate) his processing concept and execution and that is always useful.
(It is also an "admission" that the original image was less perfect in creating the four-legged illusion. But that is not a criticism.
Instead it is proof of the good work done in perfecting the illusion (regardless of method used).

Iguana Bar

Since we have opened the conversation about AI, I will go a step further and post something that admittedly has a lot of AI ingredients. I never shared anything like this here, but do share them on another site dedicated to such stuff. I use AI often in this kind of work/play, but I don't call them photos. They are images, but are composites of elements from many sources -my photography, drawing/painting, open source from free stock and museum sites, and AI ( Adobe, Chat GPT, Night Cafe, or Gemini).

When we were on the way to the airport last weekend, I saw an abandoned cabana bar with the name "Iguana Bar" painted on the side in rainbow letters and got this idea in my head. We were not able to stop for a photo so I recreated it from memory, other sources, and then AI. Once I created it, I furnished it, built the setting, and peopled it with some of the different iguanas I'd met on the island - all with the help of my own photos, free stock, AI, and Photoshop brushwork.

I don't use much AI in my "normal" photo work, other than removing occasional wires and pieces of stray trash. I take a fairly conservative approach to that kind of work. But outside this forum, I do enjoy the ability to bring a fantasy like this to life. Do you ever play with AI? How do you incorporate it into your regular workflow? Does this creation make you smile? What would you call it? (I usually call them digital illustrations).

Ah, a black swan. Very good photo!
Your shot immediately reminded me of a book I read a long time ago from a mathematician, Nassim Taleb, called
“The Black Swan”
It describes how incredibly rare and unexpected events can suddenly and unexpectedly occur and change a whole model, or way of thinking. In this particular case it was known for centauries by Europeans that swans are, and can only be, white. Then in Australia a black swan was found and threw that theory completely out of the window.
It examines how we look at statistics in general and especially at the normal distribution of probabilities like in the “bell curve” that is used so often almost everywhere. We have the tendency to ignore outliers. But it is these unusual outliers that can sometimes make radical and lasting changes to “everything”, just ask the dinosaurs about that!

Minniev, what you’re describing is the fun factor of AI.
Obviously, many people will find your photo amusing.
I do too!
But when I think of overcrowded Istanbul: I could erase a lot of people and make it look like the reality of 50 years ago.
The more photos like that circulate, the more people will believe it.
And then, when they actually visit Istanbul, they’ll be disappointed.
That’s the problem with AI: one might be tempted to portray an idealized world, even as our planet is increasingly being destroyed.
It’s just like human beauty being artificially created—whether by software or surgeons.
Since reality and fantasy are becoming increasingly blurred, the use of AI should always be disclosed.

"Roses are rad, vio Let's hang out!" ... Really? by simple.joy, on Flickr

That judging look...

We are traveling and my posts and discussion contributions will be limited in the immediate future.
Meanwhile, here is one taken at dawn by my wife at LakeTyrell, Victoria, Australia - a few days ago.

I am going to take the opportunity to address both Minnie's image and Kumsal's comments.

The image is a fun digital visual creation, based on a number of sources (some of Minnie's own photos and other elements).
I think it looks really good and is quite funny : like a still from a CGI-created animation movie.
Very well done.
I also like Minnie's forthcoming explanation about this kind of work and her explanation of the inspiration and some of her method.
(I would like to see at least some of the source elements separately, because I believe that this will make me appreciate the compositing and processing effort even more.)

I also really like Kumsal's comments and want to thank him for these thoughts, because I think they are really relevant.
AI in image creation and modification can indeed be fun when the results are obviously not based in reality.
But the same methods do indeed constitute a real danger of manipulation when the results of these techniques is presented as reality.

I do share the view and opinion :
- that use of AI in the creation of images is fine (just like the use of paint is fine for creating art),
- but such use should always be disclosed (especially when there is a danger of confusion with actual reality).

I like this! Very well done. The contrast between the hair/skin texture and the smooth surface of the eye is a wonderful reminder how strange and fascinating all living beings are, how much we are shaped by the world around us and how much we shape the world around us because of the way we are... for example creating something like a camera as an 'extension of our eye'. (My brain is getting hazy and I can't recall which writer/philosopher argued in this way, but I always found it interesting.) If our senses and our body would be different, all of our tools would be as well and the large parts of the whole world would be significantly different.

This is a fun photo, it made me smile. Very well executed. I admire your skills with using these new tools.
It's obvious that this particular image is AI generated, because I'm not used to seeing Iguanas enjoying cocktails. My brain is just about clever enough to send me the "AI detected" signals for this image.

Here's a comparison to another website.
I also take part in another larger German speaking photography image sharing website where, a while ago, a flood of AI images began to appear. sometimes (mostly?) they were declared as "AI generated" but perhaps not always. Some of the images were, like yours, fun fantasy type images, that would have been impossible to photograph normally.
Some other images e.g. Landscapes looked just amazing, what other photographers had spent ages to capture, could now be generated, by anyone with the skills to drive the easier to use AI software, to make images which made the real photos look less amazing and less valuable.
There was an outcry, both for and against posting AI images.
The first step taken by the website owners, trying to satisfy the various groups was to introduce a mandatory "AI tag".
Then users were given the possibility to use a toggle to hide/show any images in a certain category with that AI tag.
The latest step was to move out all the AI images to a completely separate category in the website.
So it's still possible to post and enjoy looking at AI images, but you won't see them if you don't want to.

I think in our smaller group we don't need such technical steps. If anyone wants to post an AI image and marks it as such, that it is fine by me.

By the way, the use of other simple tools like "noise removal with AI" is fine for me and doesn't need "declaring" unless the image is specifically trying to show some technical performance feature of a camera (but that is rare here anyway)

Thanks for the interesting tour!
The water level looks quite low in that reservoir, it's the same here in Austria.
Just read that some of the mountain huts here, that hikers love to visit, have shut down because the fresh water springs have dried up (hopefully they'll come back soon)

Some people might complain about including power lines in images, but I think it's (mostly) fine. They have become part of our landscape, sort of almost like modern monuments to our technical achievements.
Last week we watched a helicopter lay new high voltage cables between the big existing pylons in the mountains here in Mühlbach/Austria. (It was like watching a spider spin a Web between branches, ) There was a man waiting at the top of each pylon who caught the cable and fed it over a pulley wheel before the chopper pulled it on to the next one. They repeated that 3 times to lay three new higher capacity cables.
Fascinating to watch, I made some photos with my phone but they were not the best quality.

Agree completely.

Some of the processing tools and plug-ins in software like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom have been around for ages and have been well accepted to be tools that do not change the nature of a photo (from real to fake), because they are the modern equivalent of techniques from the analog darkroom (dodging, burning, timing exposure to light, timing the time spent in chemicals, masking etc).

Obviously as software evolves, many of those well-established tools are now also AI-assisted.
Some of them are quite obvious (like the automatic detection of red eyes, the cloning and replacing of unwanted elements in an image, automatic detection and masking of sky vs land etc.)
Others have more subtle AI enhancements : automatization of exposure optimalisation, contrast, blacklevel, etc.

I think it would be unfair to qualify "normal" images that have been enhanced with these means as "AI images".
We are using the same tools as always, only they are more practical.
(Removing unwanted elements from an image or expanding the width/height of images for better composition is borderline for me.
Same with HDR images that have been created from a single image instead of layering multiple exposure - those look fake to me, most of the time, anyway.)

If we need any kind of definition, I think I would qualify as an "AI image" any image that is more than the result of "normal" standard processing.
Standard processing can include all of the above, including even minor cloning/removing (as of powerlines, trash on the ground etc)
An AI image, by that kind of definition, would be an image that may or may not have started as a normal photograph, but on which intensive CONTENT-related modifications have been made, by adding or removing substantial elements, combining multiple different source images etc.

A Sky Full of Hope

Anybody visiting Frankfurt would probably not bother visiting one of its largest squares, Konstablerwache. Apart from being a useful hub of public transport and the site of the popular twice weekly Farmers' Market, there wasn't much reason for going there. Boring by day, especially visually with its utilitarian post-war buildings, and a reputation of being slightly dangerous after dark, there really is little to see. But a couple of weeks ago that changed and yesterday I went to see for myself.

It would be a monumental undertaking to beautify the buildings, but it is possible to turn peoples' gaze away from them. A massive sculpture of red and blue nets has been suspended above the square, and after dark they are illuminated by a choreographed light installation of blue and red light. It is 'A Sky Full of Hope – Earthtime 1.78 Frankfurt' by Janet Echelman, and has already made a huge difference. It is inspired by the data of the height of waves of the Tsunami which destroyed the Fukushima atomic power station (the 1.78 refers to the average increase in wave height), and is part of her Earthtime series, which include pieces in Madrid, London and Denver.
She sees her work as a trigger for inspiration - all you have to do is look up - and the colour and form will lift the spirit and counter the oppressive grey concrete. Elsewhere her works have inspired people to hold yoga classes, start drumming groups and give dance performances below them.

I hope it happens here too. It made the news again today - the fire brigade had to rescue a crow from the nets.

Thanks FP!

That's a good point. While true that outliers are most often an anomaly, not always the case as they can be a very relevant edge case not to be ignored.