Today’s project, I really admire the realistic, atmospheric film and lighting styles I see in some AI photos (often in places that don’t automatically share the prompt) and want to experiment more with those. I wanted a scene in heavy rain with misty air. Had to come up with a subject, imagined a girl sitting, bored, sheltering from the rain. With a capybara. Googled around until I found an image for reference of roughly how I was seeing her seated. Had to decide what she was sitting on, considered wooden pallets, then went with a bench under a bus shelter.
(Reference image)
So I go to Sora, describe the scene in detail and provide the reference image in addition for illustrating the pose I wanted. Ran into a reasonably unexpected problem: Sora/ChatGPT just doesn’t seem to be able to imagine her with her foot lifted up sitting on the bench with her and just hangs her foot mid-air. Had some otherwise pretty nice images spoiled by the stupid floating foot. After a few tries with prompt permutations (including dumping the reference and going text only) I decided that particular detail wasn’t a hill I cared enough to die on, so tried to think of something else for her foot to rest on, went with a backpack. And it doesn’t want to put her foot on the backpack either. (Apparently the capybara wants to sit there, though.) Kind of surprising that out of all the details it can get more or less right, that is one that stumps it. I eventually dumped the backpack, too.
Got a number of nice images, but never got the foggy look I was originally looking for no matter how I described it until I finally tried changing the film from “modern smartphone” to “1980s film stock with a disposable camera”, resulting in the bottom right photo, which is the closest to my original idea.
The final prompt for that one:
Summary
A pretty, slender teen girl. She has shoulder-length brown hair that lies limp with water (a strand or two fall down around her forehead or face). She wears a worn tan M-65 field jacket (open to expose a white cropped tank top underneath), fashionably-frayed faded black jeans and bulky white sneakers. She is sitting on a long art deco park bench under a long, simple, somewhat old, slope-roofed bus-stop style shelter. Her elbow is resting on her bent knee and her hand is cradling her head in obvious boredom. The other arm is resting on her other leg, her hand hanging relaxed. Close by her side on the bench a serene but wet capybara is sitting upright. It is raining heavily, and though she is protected under the shelter rivulets of water run from its roof. The air is misty with heavy rain and fog but in the background you can see the colorful lights of a tall futuristic city of giant skyscrapers at night across most of the horizon. Candid, completely realistic flash photograph, the subjects slightly obscured by fog as the minute suspended water droplets reflect the camera’s flash. With shallow dof and forced perspective taken on 1980s film stock with a disposable camera. It is a profile taken with a wide-angle lens from a medium distance, giving the girl, capybara, and bench a sense of lonely isolation in the rainy night. 9:16 portrait.
Bonus art styles
