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Issue 298
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End frame: The Snake River. Cauldron Linn, No. 2 Jerome County, 2003 – 2004, Thomas Joshua Cooper
David Magee chooses one of his favourite images
Jaume Llorens
Featured Photographer Revisited
Is Intimate the new Grand?
.. and is grand back in fashion?
Land
An Exhibition by Matthew Conduit
Any Questions, with special guest Lizzie Shepherd
Episode Two
More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story
An interview with Janet L. Pritchard
Topographical Chapel/Capel
The religious landscape of Wales

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Viewpoint Editor’s Letter editor@onlandscape.co.uk
Tim Parkin

The subject of AI rears its head this week with the release of SORA. This may not have got much press, but the implications are, quite frankly, earth-shaking. Most scientists working within and outside the AI world have been predicting that we'll have a full 'generalised' artificial intelligence or AGI in the next 60 to 100 years. This means one that understands the world and can respond to it with specialised code. With the advent of ChatGPT, those predictions have been coming down from 60 to 40 to perhaps 20 years. However, with the introduction of SORA, which is OpenAI's latest model for text-to-video conversion, industry insiders believe that OpenAI might well have that AGI already, and they're just working with it and trying to figure out the best way to present it to the world (very sensible if so).

So, how is text-to-video such a big leap? Well, in order to manage to create video, the AI needs to understand the world at a fairly in-depth level. How things fall, how things move, what happens when one thing goes behind another, etc. At the level of which SORA is working, the AI knows a hell of a lot about how the world works - too much to be considered just a text-to-video app. Some people will say that itís just a computer generating a bunch of frames one after another, which is like saying that human writing is just presenting one letter after another. Around this announcement are some fantastic presentations on what this release means. One of the other interesting aspects of this is that with an understanding of the world, generating 2D images becomes a hell of a lot more realistic. I've included a still from a video below (link to the video). We live in interesting times...

Sora

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Tim Parkin

Content Issue Two Hundred and Ninety Eight
On Landscape Issue80
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Issue 298

Click here to download issue 298 (high quality, 95Mb) Click here to download issue 298 (smaller download, 45Mb) more

Thomas Joshua Cooper The Snake River. Cauldron Linn, No. 2
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End frame: The Snake River. Cauldron Linn, No. 2 Jerome County, 2003 – 2004, Thomas Joshua Cooper

In the summer of 2003, Thomas Joshua Cooper travelled to Shoshone Falls in southern Idaho to photograph where the Snake River had tumbled across a 212 foot precipice more

Jllorens Gaia Diptic 108
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Jaume Llorens

That the images inspire them is probably the most common comment. They find poetry, delicacy, sensitivity and beauty in them. It's a biased collection because only positive comments reach me. more

009
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Is Intimate the new Grand?

Intimate landscapes, on the other hand, offer the photographer much more freedom. The possibilities are almost endless. more

The Edge 30 2017
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Land

Each of Conduit’s images serves as a visual narrative, weaving together the threads of his ongoing dialogue with forgotten places, inviting viewers to witness the transformation and rediscovery of these overlooked corners of the world. more

Any Questions Episode 2
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Any Questions, with special guest Lizzie Shepherd

The premise of our podcast is based loosely around Radio Four's "Any Questions", Joe Cornish and I (Tim Parkin) invite a special guest onto each show and solicit questions from our subscribers. This months guest is Lizzie Shepherd and we had a bunch of questions about her printing, skiing, creative photography, ethics, etc.. more

Pritchard 000 Pca
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More than Scenery: Yellowstone, an American Love Story

The view of Golden Gate Canyon caught my attention after looking through the Wyoming cards at a paper antiques show. It’s a classic 19th-century proscenium picture space borrowed from painting by Western exploration survey photographers of the 1870s and ’80s. more

Chapel
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Topographical Chapel/Capel

With over 6000 chapel/capel sites dotted across the country, it is clear that the religious landscape of Wales was once deeply dependent on a place to worship. more

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