🤩 Welcome to the 6 new Morfternighters who joined us last week.
We love to have you here, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Morfternight.
If you do, remember to share with a friend by clicking on this button.

Share Morfternight

📷 Photo of the week

Walk - More Photos

👋 Servus (it means “Hello” in Vienna)

I didn’t walk much this week, and for that, I’ll blame a painful ankle following a minor ping-pong incident last week. No walking, no photos, which is why I am sharing one from a fear ago instead.

It feels much better, so I hope to go out more this week.

Last week we added a chat to Morfternight, which you can join here.

Join Paolo Belcastro’s subscriber chat

Available exclusively in the Substack app

Join chat

You prefer Telegram? I got you covered, Morfternight is a free group there too, and you can join it by clicking on this link.

I am looking forward to chatting with y’all"!

🗺️ Three places to visit today

1. Quite an interesting set of charts shared by Sahil Bloom showing how much time we spend with whom based on age.

1. It reminded me of this other thread by 6529 about how most of the time we spend with the people we love is concentrated over relatively short periods of our lives.

2. He, in turn, linked to “The Tail End,” a post by Tim Urban showing how most of our relationships aren’t spread evenly across our lives.

🖼️ What’s the opposite of “cropping”?

This week I have been playing with RunwayML, a set of machine-learning tools to manipulate video, audio, and images for content creators.

I particularly enjoyed Infinite Image.

You upload an image, then define an area outside of it that you would like to complete, and finally type what you want to see there and ask the app to generate it for you.

I started with a photo I took a few weeks ago:

Then I asked the app to generate the rest of the street around the character in the foreground. In a few passes, and only a few minutes, I got here:

(Note that I could have asked for a black & white rabbit. Also, note that the butterfly was added when I asked for a window on that wall… AI’s not perfect yet.)

Encouraged by this first experiment, I uploaded a classic of mine, “Nighthawks” by Edward Hopper. I love this painting, so I use it regularly to experiment with AI tools.

This time I asked the app to show me the rest of the street, the rest of the building on the left part, and the rest of the bar on the right half. All that in the style of Edward Hopper, of course.

It took once again only a few minutes to get here:

Of course, there are many imperfections, but the fact that these results were achievable in a few minutes by simply typing a couple of short sentences is uncanny!

The photographer in me is incredibly excited by these tools.

Over the history of photography, there have been countless discussions about whether or not it is ok to crop images, which depends on the context.

I use cropping very liberally because I am not a reporter; my photos are not meant to show the truth. They are art, not news.

Others consider that whatever has been captured has to be in the picture.

I wonder what people will think about adding what wasn’t captured around the frame.

What do you think? Let me know in the chat(s)!

Substack chat - Telegram group