I really enjoy exploring macro photography images. They bring the world into sharp closeups. This morning I thought I’d spend some time playing in Midjourney by starting over at Pixabay and selecting some photos from their macro photography stock.
I chose three of them, then brought them into MJ using the /describe command which attempts to describe images it’s given. My original thought was using it on macro photography would help me to learn terms in order to create macro images. I’ve played with using ‘macro photography’ but was looking for terms to refine the images.
I soon discovered, using the images as a base created some interesting images to play with. So, I set out to do some playing. /describe gives you four options and you can simply press one of the options to have MJ generate the description as a prompt. I had each of the four prompts generate and then played with the one I liked best.
One note here, I don’t use the names of other artists in my images. That’s just too close to ripping off their work for my taste. The /describe command does use names, so when I see them in a description I remove them before generating the image set. It changes the output but doesn’t matter to me.
Midjourney lets you get the seed for your image sets. The seed is a generated number that it will read and attempt to recreate the image set. It’s great when you’re wanting to do variations on the same image. Well, close to the same image as it turns out. To get the seed use the envelop emoji. If you don’t find the emoji, you can set it with :envelop: When you use the emoji Midjourney will respond in your DMs.
So, let’s explore what I ended up with. I’m going to share the prompts as well.
Soap Bubble
I started with this image from Pixabay
This prompt caught my attention:
a glass ball sitting in the snow with light reflecting on it, in the style of attention to fur and feathers texture, light yellow and gold, sunrays shine upon it, irregular organic forms, matte photo, optical illusion --ar 80:53
Next I used the same prompt but added ‘infrared’ to it. Why? The subject came up in Creative Work Hour and I decided to play.
infrared, a glass ball sitting in the snow with light reflecting on it, in the style of attention to fur and feathers texture, light yellow and gold, sunrays shine upon it, irregular organic forms, matte photo, optical illusion --ar 80:53 --seed 1783997930
Not a big difference other than the bird became smaller. The person who had mentioned infrared in CWH also mentioned to me applying it to black and white images is really interesting. So, I added ‘black & white’ and removed colour references in the prompt.
infrared, black & white, a glass ball sitting in the snow with light reflecting on it, in the style of attention to fur and feathers texture, sunrays shine upon it, irregular organic forms, matte photo, optical illusion --ar 80:53 --seed 1783997930
The bird disappeared but the feathers remained. Never know what you’re going to get. Next I decided to use the ‘niji’ style. It’s a collaboration between Midjourney and another firm to produce anime style images. They have recently made a bot available dedicated to niji and it’s styles. I brought that into my server.
a glass ball sitting in the snow with light reflecting on it, in the style of attention to fur and feathers texture, light yellow and gold, sunrays shine upon it, irregular organic forms, matte photo, optical illusion --ar 80:53 --seed 1783997930 --niji 5 --style expressive --s 400
This time the bird is back but looks more like a sparrow than the dove look of the original prompt.
There’s two more macro photography images I used from Pixabay. With each of them I’m doing the variations like I did with the soap bubble so you can see how much images can vary when playing in MJ.
Butterfly
From Pixabay. I removed the aspect ratio from the description so I’d be working with a square image on this one.
photo of a butterfly sitting on a rock, in the style of neon and fluorescent light, light maroon and yellow, 32k uhd, striped, pentax espio mini, fanciful illustrations, long lens
infrared, photo of a butterfly sitting on a rock, in the style of neon and fluorescent light, light maroon and yellow, 32k uhd, striped, pentax espio mini, fanciful illustrations, long lens --seed 2170336623
infrared, black & white, photo of a butterfly sitting on a rock, in the style of neon and fluorescent light, 32k uhd, striped, pentax espio mini, fanciful illustrations, long lens --seed 2170336623
photo of a butterfly sitting on a rock, in the style of neon and fluorescent light, light maroon and yellow, 32k uhd, striped, pentax espio mini, fanciful illustrations, long lens --seed 2170336623 --niji 5 --style expressive --s 400
Strawberry & Milk
This is a shift from nature macro photography. I thought it might be interesting to see how they contrast.
strawberry with milk falling from the spoon to blue background, in the style of photography installations, psychedelic surrealism: , vray --ar 160:101
infrared, strawberry with milk falling from the spoon to blue background, in the style of photography installations, psychedelic surrealism: , vray --ar 160:101 --seed 3874386413
infrared, black& white, strawberry with milk falling from the spoon, in the style of photography installations, psychedelic surrealism: , vray --ar 160:101 --seed 3874386413
strawberry with milk falling from the spoon to blue background, in the style of photography installations, psychedelic surrealism: , vray --ar 160:101 --seed 3874386413 --niji 5 --style expressive --s 400
One of the things I love about Midjourney is you can never depend on the same thing showing up when you use a style or command. It will usually vary in some manner. That may change as they continue development. We’ve certainly seen a huge change on the issue of deformities in images between version 4 and 5.
You’ll never stop learning when it comes to generative art. Like when photography appeared on the scene, many artists don’t see generative art as another medium. It will come in time. In the meantime, keep on learning and developing.
Shadowspub writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc. Her Nicheless Narrative podcast airs on Thursdays each week.
NOTE: unless otherwise stated, all images are the author’s.
Some of the image work may have been done in Midjourney for which I hold a licence to use the imges commercially.
How to Connect With ShadowsPub:
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