I asked an AI to Draw me Grayscale Depth Maps of a City
You may have heard the buzz about how Dalle-2 can use your written words to create photoreal art in any style, (and about the waiting list), but did you know that you can do the same thing with Disco Diffusion? “A grayscale depth map” created by Disco...
read moreOn Instagram @grant_diffendaffer
Tell your friends I’m on the gram @grant_diffendaffer ! But while you are here check out this forest find: I’m going to be posting lots of photography, AI generated visual art, photogrammetry, and other sorts of eye candy. This is just a quick Neural Style Transfer filter job done in Photoshop. I photographed the actual safe with mushrooms spilling out last fall at Salt Point State Park in Sonoma–a place which is like a safe full of gold for mushroom...
read moreA Super Flower Blood Moon Timelapse
A time-lapse of the May 15, 2022 lunar eclipse as seen in Canyon, CA. 320 individual frames shot on Sony A7ii. Camera motion with Vixen Polarie. RAW photos processed in Lightroom with pretty heavy noise reduction applied. Frame animation in Photoshop and post in Adobe Premier...
read moreAstrophotography
I made it out to the Sierra foothills over the weekend for a visit with dear friends and some quality stargazing. Dark skies or not, my camera can see far more than my eyes because it can collect light over a long exposure to resolve faint details. Special gear? A bit, but less than you might think. Just a full frame mirrorless camera with a nice lens, and a compact star tracking mount that offsets the earths motion by rotating the camera gradually and thus reducing star trails and allowing light from faint objects to home in on a pixel on...
read moreDark Horse Rising
As an artist that treads a line between digital and physical, I have always been fascinated with imagery. These days I am leaning into this more as I explore various means of using digital tools to produce beautiful images. Here is a favorite early astrophoto that I shot last summer of the Dark Horse Nebula rearing over a tree, surrounded by the brighter galactic bulge of the Milky Way. This was a 168 second single exposure at f4.0, iso 3200. Shot on Sony A7ii with FE 24-105mm F4 G OSS using a Vixen Polarie star tracker. Processed in...
read moreUpdated Photogrammetry Collection
As you may know, my great love, next to 3D printing, is photogrammetry, a.k.a. reality capture. I have been working on them side by side for over 10 years, with printing being the perfect path from digital to physical, and reality capture doing the opposite. My reality capture collection currently spans about 10 years of shooting, numbers about 30,000 photos and many many models. I’ve been putting my best models up on Sketchfab, and there are 40 up for your viewing now–including a dozen new ones and more to come. Avalokiteshvara...
read moreNeural Style Transfer
I’ve been working with neural net image processing for a few years now, trying to figure out how to make more powerful creative use of this class of tools, which using AI to recognize and develop patterns. Here is a favorite photo, that I took of a factory from the Willamette River at Oregon City, that I have styled with the neural filters that are built into Photoshop. There are a number of online tools that take advantage of generative AI image processing algorithms, as well as a number of mobile apps. Wherever I start processing, I...
read moreFrom our Boot to Yours
Season’s Greetings. I’ve been working on Storied Haven in different ways since 2015, when I helped Bree Hylkema and Five Ton Crane build it. At the time, my interest in photogrammetry was really taking off, and I determined that the boot would make an excellent subject. I’ve had a few opportunities to take photos of it over the years, but it took until just recently where I had the combination of ample quality photos, suitable software, and some way that I could present my model with a bit of storytelling that is somehow...
read moreStoried Haven is Picture Perfect
Here is a quick turntable video of an ongoing photogrammetry project of mine. I helped build Storied Haven, along with a team of artists from 5 Ton Crane lead by Bree Hylkema. This is an immersive two story sculpture filled with detailed artworks delving into fairytale mythology. This model was computed from a few hundred photos in Reality Capture and cleaned up just a little in...
read morePortland Love
The city of my birth holds a big place in my heart. Within, Forest Park holds a special mystique. After living for 20 years in a cabin in the middle of the wilderness of Canyon, just outside of Oakland, I can well imagine what wonders lie in those deep woods. The contrast between nature and industry has always beguiled me. I’m particularly enchanted by scenes of nature taking over rusty and antiquated architecture and machinery. More on that...
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