Photoshooting and artificial dreaming with my favorite color
Hues of Blues
Come and see a selection of photoshoots and computer-generated art where blue is the protagonist.
Blue is my favorite color. First, just because. Next, because it’s in the high-energy end of the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Then, because (linked to the previous reason) it’s the color we see when all others have been scattered (the sky). Also because it was the color that spread best through the flowers I tried in recent experiments (here, here, and here). And because it is the color of water, as I discussed here. Plus, blue is at the core of the main color-definition systems (“pure” blue in Red-Green-Blue, cyan in CYMK, etc.). And, yes, again, just because.
Incidentally, four of my recent photostories happen to revolve around blue!
So what’s up with blue? Well, I present you here a selection of photos centered around the best of all colors… Jump to specific sections:
[flowers dyed blue] — [blue dreams] — [blue remix of flowers and ice]
Selection of flowers dyed blue
A wildflower that took quite some ink and spread it throughout its petals achieving a quite nice pattern:
A white clover that took up just enough ink for us to see it on close zoom:
The same pansy from a previous story but after longer exposure to the ink:
A flower that only took ink through the main vases but didn’t spread it through all the petal cells:
Blue in computer-dreamed art
How about some computer-dreamt artwork prompted with “blue flowers”? I mean trying something like what I did here with the VQGAN+CLIP neural network:
After the first 50 iterations, the program seems to have added a grain of “lake” or “sea” into the prompt, showing some blossoms instead of flowers. Nice and unexpected!
After 150–200 iterations the dream drifted a lot from the initial “blue sea with blossoms”, and is converging into something that I interpret as a kind of child room with a white wooden floor, a rough wall, a few blue puppets out of focus, and a white wooden desk. And the blue flowers in first plane:
Remixing photos and word prompts for hybrid human/artificial art
The art-painting neural network above can accept real photographs as inputs, thus giving the human artist much more control over the outputs and hence over the artistic, creative process itself. I had never tried this feature; in fact, the pictures above and all the computer-based art of my previous stories is based entirely on word prompts.
Now that I discovered how to input my own photos, I played a lot with this feature. The next figure shows a composition of 3 selected artworks, where I used not only the VQGAN+CLIP neural network but also the BIGJPG neural network to zoom on special parts of an image and rebuild it by increasing resolution -and in the process inventing more too.
I am a nature, science, technology, programming, and DIY enthusiast. Biotechnologist and chemist, in the wet lab and with computers. I write about everything that lies within my broad sphere of interests -the @lucianosphere. Check out my lists for more stories. Become a Medium member to access all its content and subscribe to get my new stories by email (original affiliate links of the platform for which I get small revenues without special costs to you).
For inquiries of all types, contact me here. For small jobs (on programming, data analysis, cryptocurrencies, biotech + bioinf project evaluations, science outreach + communication, molecular data analysis and design, molecular graphics, photography, moleculARweb tutorials, science teaching and tutoring, etc.) check my services page here.
