Full Resolution Photo Archive
aurelm.com
aurelm.com
Not sure what the upload limit on Unsplash is, but that’s where I share my photos so that they can be downloaded for free. Maybe try uploading them there?
I have a 7k USD gear, shot thousands of pictures, and put the 50 best ones on Shutterstock, I had 5 sales, and 3 were for one picture. I made a total of $0.89 USD and am still well bellow the withdrawal threshold.
It was not even worth the time uploading and annotating the 3 pictures that eventually sold.
EDIT: WOW 4600 photos.. Nature shots, sky shots, landscapes, airshows, many different countries.. 20 years of work.. amazing All kinds of photo styles, and it is obvious that this Photographer has a talent for composing, framing and finding a motive..
Incredible
From the website: "Here are some of the photos from the archive (but in low resolution. For the full resolution download the archive)."
From the archive download link (a single large zip): "Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time.
Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator."
So I wonder if some of those made it into the archive?
You'd be surprised. There's a whole lot of excellent art created with exactly that mindset. John Waters for starters...
>Ultimately, judgement of a piece of art belongs fully to the audience.
The audience are the last people who are qualified to judget a piece of art.
The audience are the only ones who can judge. Noone else will see it, after all. :)
are the full res photos 100MB digital negatives or what? would have made for a good demonstration of webtorrent
Granted, these are presumably edits from the raws, and a good AVIF or JXL export in full resolution should be more like... 5MB?
The low-res photos are hosted directly on WordPress while the archive is hosted on google drive.
This may be due to bandwidth or storage constraints/costs or some oher such limitation.
Cheers mate! I am happy to read things like this from people who are living a wonderful life and talks about it openly.
That in turn makes it slightly risky to use these photos.
I have 3x cropped 4K monitors side by side (11520 x 1600 resolution). Less-than-1:1-resolution photos stick out like a sore thumb, and I haven't been able to find much with this amount of pixels on the web. To get this many pixels, I resorted to stitching my own panoramas.
The 100MP Fuji GFX's have just enough horizontal resolution, but there aren't many full-res shots online from those cameras. I should probably just rent one at some point...
Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain administrator.
http://aurelm.com/portfolio/aurel-manea-photo-archive/#&gid=...
Then you need a cool rock formation and some mountains.
As for why he decided to do this, my take on it is, based on a link shared in this thread, that he has decided to go all-in on AI photo generation and is maybe hoping his photos get used by other AI photo enthusiasts to train their models.
there's no mention of making these public domain, so they are only free as in beer, fwiw
Probably that pros don't do that as much. It's another thing to give pictures for free when you're not selling them anyway, and another to give them for free when making them is your job.
Think of it like your cousin Joe vs Ed Sheeran doing a free concern at the local park.
I didn't use "albums away for free" because, seriously, hipsters and boomers aside, who buys albums these days?
If anyone downloaded already and could setup a torrent that would be nice. These photos are gorgeous, but not sure if he is know for one (or more) in particular.
That's exactly the kind of thing you can't really do without a clear license, as GP post insinuates.
People used to make the same arguments about introducing artificial light. So overdone!
I mean if you recreate it in order to learn the technique, that's good.
It's like in the bbc show where they were sawing logs in front of an orangutan and the orangutan copied the action, but didn't really know why.
To be clear I don't have any problems with this photographer's work, just remarked that each and every waterfall looks the same on Flickr.
the owner would need to grant a license to be free as in beer. These are fully copyrighted, that website is a catalog, and the copyright holder is offering prints for sale. technically, there is no right to download them beyond the browser and browser cache.
We need labels for "free to train AI models on", at least until/unless the governing bodies declare that all is fair use.
I think "allow our future AI overlords to learn from your work without royalty or credit" is a hard checkbox to sell for a lot of creators. At one point I moved all my cloud photos* from Google to Adobe Lightroom because the latter did offer a checkbox to the effect of "don't use my photos to train neural nets" (or maybe it was a more innocuous 'improve our future products', I can't recall, but it was explicit enough to make me switch)
*including photos of clouds
http://aurelm.com/2013/12/15/fernweh-3d-parallax-photography...
What does the full res photo give you without any open/free license? At most a desktop wallpaper. It would be more interesting to see the raw or unprocessed images under a free license.
One fun activity (for me, anyway) is to take the same landscape scene with my phone, my m43rds (crop sensor camera with very opinionated JPEGs and neutral RAW processing), and my full frame mirrorless camera (just RAW here as the JPEGs are more neutral).
And then compare them (the iPhone is definitely more opinionated that even the m43rds JPEGS) and try to post process the full frame RAWs (which even without HDR have 14 stops of range) to match the iPhone.
It's often surprisingly hard (iPhones auto do HDR, for instance) and points out how much the photos I get on my phone don't reflect what I'm seeing (or reflect it in a post-straight-photography way).
It's quite depressing, this is coming from another photographer. Real photography is circling the drain.
Velvia film has a reputation for producing very saturated photos, so this has been going on for a long time.
Those models are going to squeeze “real” photographers into an ever smaller niche, which is ironic given that the original photography is the ground-truth training material that enabled the models in the first place, and the generosity of this particular photographer is probably furthering this vicious cycle.
I started doing photography as a means of staying sane during COVID lockdowns. It has been a great way to get me outside and moving (mostly in nature) when there was not much else to do.
Having said all that, I think the real value in photography is the doing itself. Yes, the profit generated by each photograph will go down to zero, but I think the real value for people will come from the experience of going out and making a photo.
My most memorable photograph is waking up at sunset in the middle of the mountains only to see the sun shine on a giant piece of rock. The photos I took are good, but you can just google it and you will see thousands of them.
The photos I took are just a reminder of me running out of the tent to stare at the beauty of nature. AI will never give me that. Not because it can’t generate a better photo, but because it can’t generate the pain on my back from a heavy backpack.
Photography thought me how to look for those odd moments at sunset/sunrise, weird cloud formations that make the rest of the experience that much more enjoyable.
But people who are making photographs for others to consume (not you; not me) are what the grandparent comment are referring to. AI is definitely going to squeeze them very hard, unless they're generating something AI doesn't.
It's not about the scenery. Obviously you can fake all of that. It's about the interactions between the people, and those split-second moments representing the feelings of the people involved. Good look getting that with AI.
(1) E.g. "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept" might become "Sharpness is no longer even a bourgeois concept" : )
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But why?