In their personal project ‘Cloud’, the two car photographers from WE! Shoot it, aka Michael Compensis & Thomas von Salomon, get to the bottom of what’s possible at the moment with AI as an imaging medium. The result is the world’s first spread of commercial character for which an AI and photography hybrid was used.

“When Michael began, quite early, at the beginning of 2023 to experiment with text to image and image to image AI, I was still very skeptical. It all looked like a nice thing to play around with, but I didn’t really see any sustainable use of AI in our photographic work,” Thomas von Salomon tells GoSee.

A half a year of working with it intensively, doing research and a bit more training later, it was an entirely different story.

“It is actually quite similar to photography. Of course, you can create a few nice pictures pretty fast in the beginning, but if you really want to be able to prompt properly and get reproducible, target-driven results out of AI, it does take a little more. A deeper technical understanding and experience are crucial,” says Michael Compensis.

“It became clear relatively quickly that certain content could be generated well through prompts, and some content, on the other hand, not at all. AI is in part good at merging elements in an unusual manner. This makes images possible that could hardly be realized at all or only under extreme difficulty by means of photography alone, and it also enables the development of ideas in the design and creation process that only a year ago were unimaginable. But when it comes to the real depiction of objects, you reach the limits of what you can do with AI pretty fast.

The prompt ‘Porsche 911’ may then contain important cross-references from the training material in the generated image so that it’s possible to recognize a Porsche, but it has little to do with the real car upon taking a more detailed look. Which is why, we knew fairly quickly that serial commercial images could only be generated with a hybrid method.” Michael Compensis concludes.

“Our intention was to use the capabilities of AI as an imaging technology to create a spread with a surrealistic look. As a basis, we decided to shoot the photographic elements in the daylight studio of Inmotion in Allgäu because that would already result in a very graphical appearance with daylight. We really had a lot of luck with the weather because the light and sky themselves already had an otherworldly appearance to them.” says Thomas von Salomon.

What the Inmotion Studio did above all provide the duo with was an empty stage with enough depth to give the AI free space. The car in front of the lens was the Mercedes A-Class. All other elements were generated by the creative duo with various AI solutions.

“Thanks to the extensive experience we gained through months of testing how to prompt, we were able to generate the corresponding elements reproducibly and in a uniform visual language. In doing so, it was above all also important to us to create a certain tension between the individual motifs with corresponding size ratios, which tends to be rather difficult to achieve with generative AI. But I think we did a very good job of it.

The challenge then, in the end, was once again merging it coherently with the photographic elements in post production. Also, we had to first overcome the obstacle that most AIs are limited to a relatively low resolution up until now because we wanted to use only excerpts of some of the generative elements. In some cases, this made it necessary to use a resolution ten times what the AI is actually capable of delivering.” says Michael Compensis, who took care of post production in-house this time. “A hybrid approach was then taken here again with different AIs for generating and scaling.”

The result in the end is an impressive spread with serial character that consciously explores the question of reality and surrealism in artificially generated images. By the way, the motifs are all at least 8600px wide, which means they can be presented in large format without a problem.

The creative duo WE! SHOOT IT is represented by Kelly Kellerhoff, Berlin.

GoSee : we-shoot-it.com
07.09.2023 show complete article

“We have been toying with the idea of saying goodbye to conventional visual language in the studio for a while,” the two advertising pros from WE! shoot it, aka Michael Compensis & Thomas von Salomon c/o KELLY KELLERHOFF, tell GoSee. “Der POLESTAR 2 gave us the perfect canvas to further refine our projection technology, which we have used in our PORSCHE projects. This time, the projection is used in a descending manner. The image does not condense two-dimensionally but creates a light frame within which everything is shaped three-dimensionally.”

Alongside stills & people elements, they also produced moving image content. “Particularly the challenge of producing stills and images as if from a single source is what makes working in the studio so thrilling. The water reflections are prominently highlighted through their fine movements in the film and as a fixed pattern in the stills.”

Leonie M c/o Instyle was the model in front of the camera, who was styled by Sabine Holderer with hair & makeup by Franka Gutsche, both c/o FAME.
29.06.2023 show complete article

The two photographers from WE! shoot it, aka Michael Compensis & Thomas von Salomon c/o KELLY KELLERHOFF, were booked by the business consultants and salesforce service providers from SALESFIVE, with offices throughout Germany, for the relaunch of their visual language focused on people (GoSee reported). We now present you another fresh batch of expressive portraits with an interplay of colors and design.

“The main focus was on creating authentic portraits and people shots that convey the young and fashion-savvy lifestyle of SALESFIVE that didn’t look anything like your typical business consultants,” the two photographers tell GoSee. “I think the client was impressed by our somewhat different approach to people in our transportation spreads, what might have led them to book us instead of a classic people photographer. Which, of course, we were quite pleased about.”

We first photographed at the Salesfive branches in Munich and Berlin, partly with models and in part with employees. Hair & makeup were taken care of by Stefan Kehl c/o Fame in Berlin and Milka Barbin, c/o Fame in Munich. Styling across projects was in the hands of Sabine Holderer c/o Fame.

GoSee we-shoot-it.com
18.04.2023 show complete article