YOU NEED THE WORLD'S WIDEST WIDE ANGLE FOR THIS!

This picture is a screen grab from the National Geographic video on the Mauritanian Iron Ore Train.



The thin line across the image just below the horizon is the train - the wagons are just visible even if you zoom in, showing the distance from which this was filmed. Maybe VR or sacked panoramas would be the only way to view the whole train!

By the way, the video is worth watching, if only to show what a simple life we live. The fishmonger takes the 30 hour trip with fresh fish from the port, rests at home for two days before repeating the trip to make around $50 a week.

GOOGLE PHOTOS - WHERE'S THE AI?

Around a year ago I searched my Google Photos for "snow" and was very disappointed with the large number of false positives it gave. Also that it raised doubts around the false negatives it could be giving which are much harder to quantify or identify.

I have now repeated the search



and found very little change and no obvious improvement. This isn't the picture we get of computers learning and improving.

Google Photos also found an exposure bracketed set in my images and produced an HDR for me, which I show on the right below.



Overlooking the poor quality and the button on the top right, which come from the screen capture, I would think most would agree that the colours go Google's HDR new unrealistic and unpleasing. Again not the performance of a leaning algorithm.

Not a very nice looking posting but hopefully interesting.

Lets have your views.

TRANSFORMING PHOTOGRAPHS

I find a lot of enjoyment in transforming fairly straight forward photographs into colourful, eye catching designs.

© 2018 Dave Harcourt.  All rights reserved

© 2018 Dave Harcourt.  All rights reserved

Email me if you are also interested in transforming images.

A FEW MIXED IMAGES TO GET GOING

© 2018 Dave Harcourt.  All rights reserved

Over 40 years ago

Over 40 years since this was taken and it's still perfect after having had no attention - today's jpeg will certainly not last that long unattended.

© 1976 Dave Harcourt.  All rights reserved

Bob Chuffin

Click the image to see Bob's work.

If You Think Google Photos AI is Magic

I have always wondered about the real advantage of Google Photos as a free storage strategy. Many people rave about searching all your photos with AI but I have always wondered. 

Its easy to see what it pulls out for you and even that is sometimes pretty poor, like this search for snow.

Admittedly there was no snow in this period and it did find some snow photos later. So we can get an idea of how accurate it is in what it finds - in this case 18 out of 106 photos returned were errors!

The converse error is more difficult to evaluate - how many snow pictures did it not find and what if the one I really needed was one of these?

When I here people saying Google Photos is magic and the answer to photo storage - I am not convinced