Flying Fish by Jared - FINISHED - Model Shipways - 1:96

[Rick310]

Beautiful work Jared!!

Makes me inspired to get finished!!

Rick

[Jared]

Feeling the need for some creativity in image making, I fed one of the photos of my Flying Fish model into Google Gemini and asked it to create a photorealistic image of what the ship would have looked like in Boston Harbor in the 1850's.  I was blown away by the results, which I share here:

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:46 PM by Jared

[Rick310]

Wonderful pictures!! They have a very John Stobart feel!!

Rick

[ClipperFan]

15 hours ago, Jared said:

Feeling the need for some creativity in image making, I fed one of the photos of my Flying Fish model into Google Gemini and asked it to create a photorealistic image of what the ship would have looked like in Boston Harbor in the 1850's.  I was blown away by the results, which I share here:

 

 

@Jared those two AI generated images are simply amazing. They do indeed have a John Stobart setting feel to them like @Rick310 observed. I especially appreciate the authentic Boston setting with the great variety of supporting vessels surrounding the main subject. This particular angle of your model hasn't appeared before, that I can tell. This would make a wonderful stepping off setting to create a lovely painting. As a way of observing AI limitations, I noticed a lot of changes from this clipper ship portrayal and your actual model. Bowsprit color changed from black to white. Both large wooden stock anchors are gone. Your carefully carved flying fish figurehead has been replace by an anomalous white blob. The forward raised forecastle is gone as is the forward "capstan". Composite masts have been replaced by solid ones. The main house abaft the foremast is too short. These are not critiques of your creativity in generating these amazing scenes, rather my recognition of the limitations of the tool. I would love to see another such historic dockside setting but using one of your broadside photos.

[Jared]

I will try creating some more Ai images broadside, soon as I finish making a few more focus stacked images.   With the Ai images, your images are only as good as what you can instruct the Ai generator to do.  There is a lot of luck involved  to this.  

[ClipperFan]

@Jared you did an incredibly effective job with the limitations you described. As we both wrote, the generated images are quite reminiscent of John Stobart's historically active pieces. 

[Jared]

Here are the last of my focus stacked images on my completed Flying Fish.  The images were photographed on large sheets of white paper.  The most difficult problem I encountered with this technique was trying to cleanup the background of the images in Lightroom, where the sheets overlapped or crinkled.  I was pleased, however, that the focus stacking produced sharp images of the ship throughout the images.  It took between 12 and 30 raw images to create the various images.  The images were stacked using Helicon Focus.  I used a Nikon D850 camera mounted on a sturdy tripod, with 24-70mm f2.8 and 105 mm f2.8 lenses.

 

 

[ClipperFan]

@Jared beautifully done focus stacked images. You're all set for the next model ship world contest, whenever that is announced. The other option in the contest is to provide 4 additional builder's choice photos. Thanks for the focus stacked photographic tutorials. I'm also very curious as to the new Google Gemini tool. Fascinating possibilities. I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday.

[ClipperFan]

17 hours ago, Jared said:

Here are the last of my focus stacked images on my completed Flying Fish.  The images were photographed on large sheets of white paper.  The most difficult problem I encountered with this technique was trying to cleanup the background of the images in Lightroom, where the sheets overlapped or crinkled.  I was pleased, however, that the focus stacking produced sharp images of the ship throughout the images.  It took between 12 and 30 raw images to create the various images.  The images were stacked using Helicon Focus.  I used a Nikon D850 camera mounted on a sturdy tripod, with 24-70mm f2.8 and 105 mm f2.8 lenses.

 

 

@Jared there's an apparent anomaly in some of your fore and aft focus stack images. The fore topgallant mast seems to have a noticeable bow instead of being straight. Is this on the actual model or an effect of the photographic process?

Edited 2 hours ago by ClipperFan
images added

[Jared]

As much as I would like to blame lens distortion for this "optical illusion" I can't.   As I mentioned several times in this blog, the requirement to drill sheaves in the thinnest spars made these areas extremely fragile and a few snapped during the subsequent  rigging process (see #230 and #373) when I was attaching the lift grommets. Where the observed "bow" occurs, I used epoxy for the repair but had difficulty aligning the spars. 

 

The bowing actually looks worse than it actually is, because of the way the chain crosses over it.  At the time if this break a lot of the rigging on the lower sections of the foremast had completed so I made the decision to leave well enough alone as alignment looked fine from the port and stbd. views.

 

For the break discussed in #373, the broken pieces were pinned and glued together, ensuring good alignment.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Jared