Connor (and Beth) in the Snow

Connor in AI generated snow.

With rare exceptions, I am a photographic purist. What you see in my photos is what I was seeing when I clicked the camera shutter. On the rare occasion when I dramatically change an image from what I saw when I clicked the shutter, I point that out. This is one of those images.

It began as a joke. Another photographer, who is also a good friend, asked me why I didn’t drop Connor in a snow bank, like I did Beth, another violinist. He asked if I was prejudiced against female violinists. He was making reference to “The Incident”. More about that later. So I created the image above to show I also put male violinists in snow drifts.

Beth in a howling snow storm.

Beth (a university trained violinist) and I got the crazy idea to shoot her playing in a snow storm. She really is playing her violin while I created images. At one of our locations were were walking from a country road out to a corn field and we were unaware the snow had drifted and was hiding a deep ditch. As we walked toward the field she broke through the snow and dropped straight down. Nothing but her head, neck, and one shoulder and arm was above the snow. She was holding her violin straight up in the air to keep it out of the snow. I was right behind her and trying not to slide down in the hole she was in. The whole story, including how I got her out, is here.

We both laughed about it later. Neither of us were hurt and her violin and my cameras ended up ok.

But that gave rise to my friend kidding me about getting a female violinist deep in a snow bank and not a male violinist. So I used AI to create an image of Connor in a snow bank.

Connor, Graceland University. Original image.

Using Photoshop’s AI feature, I drew a circle around the bottom half of the original image and wrote “create snow drifts”, and in just a few seconds AI did its thing.