ipernity: Articles by Don Sutherland

Imagining the Impossible

- 3 days ago - 3 comments

Creativity often begins with a simple question: What else could this be? As it is now autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, I focused on autumn leaves for this example. A fallen autumn leaf, viewed conventionally, is merely a seasonal object. It is beautiful in its colors, distinctive in its structure, and fleeting in its existence. Yet imagination allows us to transcend its familiar identity. Its veins might become the tributaries of a great river, its curled edges the slopes of towering mou…

Using AI: Re-imagining the Past

- 31 Oct 2026 - 5 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers digital artists extraordinary opportunities to reimagine the past, bringing historical periods, artistic traditions, and cultural artifacts to life in compelling new ways. By combining historical knowledge with creative experimentation, artists can reconstruct ancient settings, reinterpret classical works of art, and visualize objects or scenes that might otherwise exist only in the imagination. These capabilities open new possibilities for storytelling, histo…

Using AI: Artistic Creation through Extreme Magnification

- 24 Oct 2026 - 3 comments

Extreme magnification transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, revealing an extraordinary visual universe hidden within the smallest fragments of an image. As a photograph is enlarged far beyond its original resolution, recognizable forms begin to dissolve into fields of color, geometric structures, and fragmented boundaries. What initially appears to be a human face, an ancient sculpture, or an ordinary object becomes an intricate abstract landscape of squares, rectangles, interrupted conto…

Using AI: Creating Cubist Abstract Art

- 17 Oct 2026 - 3 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows photographers to transform photos into abstract Cubist artwork. Transforming photographs into abstract Cubist artwork offers a way to move beyond the literal description of a scene to explore its underlying visual structure. Photography naturally records recognizable subjects, but Cubist abstraction allows the artist to dismantle those subjects into shapes, planes, lines, colors, rhythms, and fragments. Perspective can be broken apart, forms can overlap, and f…

The Four Seasons in a Golden Age of Glamour

- 10 Oct 2026 - 1 comment

The calendar page has turned to October. Fall is upon us. This break from summer is a reminder that even as time presses ahead in linear fashion, cycles are all around us. One of the most potent cycles is that of the changing seasons. This series is a kind of love letter to changing seasons viewed through the lens of the Roaring ’20s. The images are visual narratives built from photos I had taken across the seasons from the New York Botanical Garden to the New Hampshire countryside. The fashi…

Using AI: Restoring Photos

- 03 Oct 2026 - 8 comments

Today, the photo restoration sector of the global photofinishing industry generates $600 million to $1.8 billion in revenue. Photos are restored to repair physical damage, decay, or other ravages of aging. The goal is to recover or preserve memories from families to events. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) now make it possible for individuals to restore and even bring color to old photos. I use a two-prompt sequence to restore aged photos into color. To demonstrate the use of these…

Using AI: Kodak’s Circle of Memory

- 26 Sep 2026 - 3 comments

Introduced by George Eastman in 1888, the Original Kodak made photography accessible to anyone who could press a button. It came loaded with a 100-exposure roll of flexible film that produced circular images 2⅝ inches in diameter. After the roll was finished, the camera could be returned to Kodak for developing, printing, and reloading, helping turn photography into an informal and personal way to preserve everyday life. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now democratizing photography in similar…

Using AI: Where Tomorrow’s Fashion Blooms

- 19 Sep 2026 - 5 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming fashion design by expanding human creativity. Instead of beginning with a blank page, designers can use AI as a collaborative creative partner that rapidly generates concepts, explores alternative silhouettes, experiments with unexpected color harmonies, and visualizes garments before a single piece of fabric is cut. A single inspiration, such as the form of an orchid, the warm haze of a smoky summer sky, or the geometry of a historic building, can qu…

Using AI: From Photographs to Living Memories

- 12 Sep 2026 - 3 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can turn a group of ordinary photographs into a thoughtfully designed memory collage by helping with selection, cropping, arrangement, color balance, and visual hierarchy. Rather than placing every image into a rigid grid, AI can identify a strong focal photograph, organize supporting images around it, and create a unified composition through coordinated borders, backgrounds, spacing, and typography. It can also make subtle improvements to brightness, contrast, sharp…

Using AI: Capture First, Reveal Later

- 05 Sep 2026 - 2 comments

For decades, NASA has produced extraordinarily detailed images of distant objects, including galaxies seen as they existed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. These images do not emerge from telescopes as finished photographs. Instruments aboard telescopes, spacecraft, and robotic explorers collect raw data, which are transmitted to Earth and processed through sophisticated, multi-stage systems. The James Webb Space Telescope provides a powerful example. Because Webb observes…

Using AI: Creating Postcards

- 29 Aug 2026 - 2 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform photographs into professionally designed postcards by combining image enhancement, careful cropping, typography, framing, and layout. A simple landscape, family memory, travel scene, or institutional photograph can be elevated into a polished visual statement with a title, location, date, or short message that strengthens its meaning. AI can also adapt the design to specific printing dimensions while preserving the character of the original image. Th…

Using AI: Transforming Photos into Daguerreotype-Style Images

- 22 Aug 2026 - 2 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transform a contemporary photograph into a daguerreotype-style image by analyzing the original scene and reconstructing its appearance through the visual characteristics of early photography. It can convert modern color into restrained sepia, silver-gray, or brown monochrome tones, soften highlights, compress contrast, and reproduce the distinctive reflective quality associated with polished metal plates. AI can also simulate period lens behavior, including sharp…

After The Warning

- 15 Aug 2026 - 2 comments

Paris, July 2035: At 2°C of warming, summer no longer arrives. Heat settles over cities like a sealed lid, warping rail lines, emptying playgrounds, and turning night into a second, darker afternoon. Rivers shrink within their banks. Crops wither in fields that once fed millions. Coastlines disappear beneath tides that reach farther inland with every storm. In one part of the world, families flee walls of fire beneath an orange noon. In another, they climb onto rooftops as floodwater rise…

Solar Eclipse 2024: Looking Back

- 12 Aug 2026 - 3 comments

Iceland and Spain experienced a total solar eclipse today. Iceland's view was thwarted by thick overcast. Below are four images from a total solar eclipse that occurred on April 8, 2024 that I photographed while in Moose River/Jackman, Maine. Below is the Purkinje Effect during that eclipse. Under this phenomenon, peak luminance shifts toward the blue end of the color spectrum. One can visibly see this shift at the Moon’s border. The next total solar eclipse will occur on August…

Using AI: Reinventing Design

- 08 Aug 2026 - 3 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a creative partner in magazine design and graphic art, giving more people access to capabilities once limited to professional studios. A well-constructed prompt can guide the system through the same early decisions a designer would make: gathering the title, article, pull quote, and photographs; establishing a visual hierarchy; and defining the intended tone. In the example prompt, the AI is not simply told to “make a page.” It is given a discipli…

Using AI: Transforming Photos into Autochrome Lumière-Style Color Images

- 01 Aug 2026 - 1 comment

Autochrome Lumière photographs were among the earliest commercially successful forms of color photography. The process was patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903 and marketed in 1907. The process used a glass plate coated with microscopic grains of dyed potato starch that acted as a color screen. The resulting images were known for their delicate, luminous hues, gentle softness, muted contrast, and subtle pointillist texture, giving landscapes, portraits, and everyday scenes an almost dreamlik…

Using AI: Creating Personalized Stationery

- 25 Jul 2026 - 7 comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can serve as a creative partner that helps people turn personal photographs, ideas, and preferences into polished stationery, notecards, thank-you cards, and other paper goods. A person provides the meaning and direction: the photographs to use, the occasion, the desired mood, the wording, and the details that must remain unchanged. AI can then assist with composition, typography, color coordination, image fading, cropping, spacing, and print-safe placement. It can q…

Using AI: From Captured Moment to Creative Canvas

- 18 Jul 2026 - 5 comments

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing photography from a process centered mainly on capturing an image into one that also includes intelligent reconstruction, refinement, interpretation, and creative transformation. AI tools can reduce noise, restore damaged photographs, correct lighting, remove distractions, expand backgrounds, improve resolution, and combine images in ways that once required advanced technical skill. AI has expanded creative possibilities. These possibilities include pan…

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