Blog Entry #1

Blog Entry #1: Post with Pictures

I'll be comparing three different photos for this post: a personal photo that I've taken; a photo from a "stock photo" site or one bearing a Creative Commons license; and one made by a "generative AI" tool.

In terms of the images themselves, I wanted to pick three images that are similar, so that they would be comparable. 

The first one might be one of my favorite beach photos that I've ever taken. It was purely an accidental but perfect shot, as it was a stranger walking through the frame. I was in San Francisco, visiting an old roommate, and we happened to go to the beach right at sunset. We hadn't seen each other in over a year, so we watched the sun set, dipped our toes in the ocean, and caught up on all the things we missed. Everything was warm and the air smelled just salty enough that you could taste it on the tip of your tongue. This photo visually reflects all the feelings of warmth that happened around it. 

For the next photo, as I was looking at stock images of people on the beach during sunset on Unsplash, it popped right out to me. I liked the unnecessary umbrella in the image, as it shows the image was intentional; who would use an umbrella, on a clear day, during sunset at the beach? To be fair, parasols are very popular in Asia, including South Korea. I also liked the more muted colors, as I found that many of stock images of the beach were heavily edited and saturated. 

The final image was AI generated. While it's a pretty image, and putting prompts into image generating AI can be fun, it's definitely not my favorite. The clouds don't look quite right, and everything is too smooth. There's no rawness to it. I do think that it looks a lot more like a stock image as a result. That being said, I'd prefer to support a real photographer by using and crediting their stock image work. As far as AI generated images go, I think I'll stick to using them for giggles only, as it can create some pretty weird but entertaining images.

This post was a good lesson on how to properly attribute images in my blog. After this exercise, I'll be going through all my other images (most of which are my own), to double check that they're properly attributed. Having no attributions or poor attributions (regardless of intent), can lead to legal threats. In certain situations, "copyleft trolling" will look for minor and honest mistakes to profit off of.