When I first started seeing AI art, I was wondering how I could push it with photography. I was excited to see what people would do with it and how they’d push the boundaries of it. The first thing I wanted to try was to develop an AI image, then use that as a starting point for a photo shoot. Gina wanted to do a shoot with orchids and ferns. So, we made an AI image of a female portrait around orchids and ferns using the new beta photo application in Midjourney. I then used a program called Set.A.Light 3D to figure out how the lighting was done in the AI portrait. For the most part, I’ve found that Midjourney likes to make images using paramount (or butterfly) lighting. Once I figured out the angle of the strobe and shooting distance, we set up and took a few test shots. Gina did her makeup to match the makeup in the AI image and set her hair to be rather similar as well. The challenge was to blend the colors and skin texture of the real photo with the AI image. It took a lot of work shifting the skin tones and getting the shadows and highlights to match up, but thanks to what I learned from Phlearn I think I was able to achieve a pretty nice result.
