The Samsung Galaxy S24 delivers the next-gen photography companion that the Samsung Galaxy Camera promised to be 12 years ago – a rethink of what we can expect from our pocket cameras.

No longer is multi-frame processing the killer smartphone trick. Now, thanks to generative AI, phones such as the Galaxy S24 are starting to suggest complex edits and even pull them off. As TechRadar‘s former cameras editor, that prospect remains a pretty head-spinning one. A few years ago, I was reviewing compact cameras such as the Sony RX100 series – which now look about as advanced as a Kodak Brownie.

From the Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 Pro onwards, phones won’t only be capable of automating the photo-taking process, they’ll handle the post-processing, too. To an extent, they’re already doing this – but, as our hands-on Samsung Galaxy S24 review shows, the promise of “pro-like AI edits in a snap” isn’t yet consistently delivered. “Artifacts” could become the word of the year in photography, given how big generative AI is about to become.

Nevertheless, however you feel about algorithms taking a healing brush to your memories, the S24 confirms that this tech is here to stay – and its implementation on Samsung‘s new flagships has left me with seriously mixed feelings…

The case for

The Galaxy S24 series certainly does a lot right. An “AI-powered camera”, as Samsung calls it, could easily get carried away and unleash a torrent of fakery and deepfakes on social media. The S24 has even played things safer than the Pixel 8 Pro, which pushes the limits of social acceptability with its face-swapping Best Take feature. 

There are some genuinely useful new features. The S24’s on-device ProVisual engine can look at your photos and make Edit Suggestions – “erase shadows” and “erase reflections,” for example. What’s impressive is that these are hardly simple edits –they’re things that a few years ago would have taxed even a professional photo editor.

For me, the highlight of the S24’s camera reveal was Instant Slow-Mo for video. Shooting scenes in slow motion is something that again troubles pro shooters today. With traditional cameras, you have to pre-empt when something spectacular is going to happen and choose a high frame-rate and shutter speed, which comes with compromises.

However, because Instant Slow-Mo is able to generate extra frames based on movement in the scene, you can achieve the effect instantly by holding your finger on the screen while shooting standard 4K/60p video, or afterwards when the action is over. It doesn’t work perfectly yet – our hands-on review found that it produced some “weird artifacting”, something I’ve also seen with certain Pixel 8 Pro features, such as Magic Editor. But the idea is certainly a promising one.

In a similar vein, I also like the fact that whenever the Galaxy S24 uses generative AI to amplify an image, a watermark is added to the image and the metadata. That’s a sensible move that echoes Sony, Canon and Nikon’s attempts to combat deepfakes with digital signature tech and Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CIA).

But I also have three big concerns about the Galaxy S24’s AI tricks and what it’s going to do for photography and video – or what Samsung loves to call “content creation”…

The case against

The first concern is simply that, once the Galaxy S24 has taken AI editing mainstream, won’t our photos ultimately all look the same? As much as Samsung claims that the S24 will learn your preferred editing style, its ProVisual engine has a one-track mind – to make your photos and videos look as “perfect” as possible. To be a T-1000 for pesky imperfections.

Samsung says the aim of its AI-powered camera is to “bring your creativity to life”. I’d argue that it achieves the opposite. Like the best AI art generators, these Galaxy AI editing tools do an incredibly good impression of creativity. They’ll make your holiday photos look like they’ve come straight out of a glossy brochure – and there’s nothing wrong with that; but let’s not pretend that they’re encouraging creativity. They may just make our memories all look strangely homogenous.

My second concern is perhaps even more old-man-yells-at-cloud. I can’t really criticize Samsung for including a Generative Edit feature on the Galaxy S24 series that lets users move objects around photos – after all, Google and Adobe have both let that generative genie out of the bottle. But given the Galaxy range’s popularity and reach, that feature could again spark a significant change.

From now on, our camera rolls will no longer be digital photo albums or diaries, but more like Pixar-style dream worlds that you can’t fully trust. Yes, image manipulation is as old as photography, and all digital photos are an act of recreation to a degree, but this is different. Somehow, I don’t think watermarks and metadata will stem that tide.

These arguments about generative AI will probably date as badly as the horse owners who decried the dawn of the motor car, but my final concern is likely more universal. The Galaxy S24’s fine-print revealed that “Galaxy AI features will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices”, after which there will presumably be some sort of subscription.

We don’t yet know which features will be paid-for, but the conclusion is clear – smartphone giants such as Samsung see AI-powered camera features as the next cloud storage-style cash cow. Somehow, this feels worse than that – ring-fencing features that are inside an already expensive pocket camera brings to mind BMW’s doomed attempt to charge a subscription for heated car seats. 

We’ll see how that one plays out, but I don’t remember paying a subscription for Portrait mode. Admittedly, Portrait mode doesn’t require expensive cloud processing, but smartphone cameras are about to get a lot more messy and confusing – and that undermines the user-friendliness of these new AI features.

You press the button, we do the rest

It’s been an incredible five years or so for smartphone cameras – and with the Samsung Galaxy S24, we’re moving into the next age of mobile photography, one where we have an intelligent, robot photo editor in our pockets.

The Google Pixel 8 Pro kickstarted this era, becoming the first smartphone to bake generative AI right into its photography process. But the Galaxy S24 series, with features such as Edit Suggestion and Generative Fill, promises to take it mainstream – and that will be as significant as the arrival of computational photography in 2016.

The S24’s ProVisual engine definitely still needs some major tuning, and AI photo editing is far from a consistent magic trick. But for someone who has spent years reviewing cameras, it definitely feels like the start of something big – and also the modern-day successor to Kodak’s famous “you press the button, we do the rest” campaign for its early cameras (that was an incredible 135 years ago).

Back then, photography was derided by painters and artists as being a soulless, mechanical impression of real creativity. Maybe generative AI editing will win me over eventually; but for now, Samsung has done an impressive job (subscription concerns aside) at bringing it to the Galaxy S24 series in a useful, restrained way. Exactly how well it all performs in the real world is something we’ll discover soon in our full Galaxy S24 review. 

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Posted: 20th January, 2024 by The Editor

Rat Saw God was one of our favorite records of 2023 at The Alternative, so when Wednesday announced their tour of the record, we knew that we had to see them live. Jay had the pleasure of photographing the band at the iconic Union Transfer in Philly. With support from up-and-comers Hotline TNT and Echotracer, the show was a feast for the ears. Check out Jay’s amazing photos from the show.

Photos by Jay Leiby

The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.

Internationally acclaimed Danish photographer Søren Solkær released his ninth photographic monograph, Starling, just after Christmas. The sequel to Solkær’s best-selling book, Black Sun, Starling shows starling murmurations in a hauntingly beautiful way.

With Starling, Solkær continues exploring a lifelong passion. Having grown up in southern Denmark, the incredible murmuration phenomenon has long been a regular sight for the photographer.

Although this photographic journey was once confined to Denmark, Solkær has since followed the beautiful birds outside Scandinavia, photographing murmurations throughout Europe, including in Ireland, England, the Netherlands, and Italy.

While often watched from a distance, as a sky-borne black mass of birds, with Starling, Solkær also takes a much closer look at starlings, even going so far as to capture microscopic images of starling feathers at the Panum Institute in Copenhagen using electron microscopes. A photographic project does not often span the micro and macroscopic like this. From an individual feather at the cellular level to wide-angle images of hundreds of thousands of birds in flight, Starling runs the gamut.

Development During a Long-Term Photo Project

“My artistic approach has developed a lot during the six years I have done work with starlings. I love working on one subject matter for many years. As more time and energy is invested, the project starts giving back and offering new and often times surprising perspectives,” Solkær tells PetaPixel.

“After Black Sun, I felt that I was far from exhausting my interest in the starlings. My new book, Starling, examines the murmuration phenomenon from a more scientific and mythological angle.”

Starlings are significant in Roman mythology, so Solkær has included Roman religious architecture in some of his work.

“After years of photographing mainly large formations, I got interested in taking a much closer look at the starlings. Through the microscope lens, I ventured into a domain where atoms assemble into orderly arrays, molecules form intricate structures,” the photographer continues.

“It’s a reminder that the same fundamental forces that govern the cosmos also shape the tiniest building blocks of life.”

A Lifelong Interest, But Also a Professional Departure

After years of working on starling photographs, it would be easy to think that Solkær is a nature or wildlife photographer. And while Solkær’s photography is often inspired by or adjacent to nature, he is best known for his portraiture, especially of musicians. Solkær has captured iconic images of Björk, The White Stripes, Paul McCartney, Pharrell Williams, Adele, Patti Smith, and Amy Winehouse, among others. The photographer also has a cinematic angle to much of his work, citing filmmakers like David Lynch and Wong Kar-Wai as filmic inspirations.

Alongside being inspired by filmmakers, the photographer also does motion picture work.

“I do both film and stills, but mainly stills. I actually find that the films are the most obvious way to capture the murmurations.”

Video can often better show the constantly flowing movement of murmuring starlings. To try to reflect the dynamism in stills, Solkær sometimes uses long-exposure photography techniques.

“The stills are more demanding to create — and more rewarding when they happen,” he explains.

“During the murmurations, a lot of figures and shapes appear that change so quickly that the brain can hardly recognize them. That is the beauty and the challenge of stills. Capturing and freezing those shapes and constellations, that only happen once in the history of the world.”

“My work up until this project, I have always worked as a director, a creator. I have been in charge of creating concepts, ideas, and moods in my images. With Black Sun, I have opened up to connect with and receiving from nature.”

Solkær continues, “I have used my previous earned skills afterward in the editing process, finding a visual expression for the images, choosing paper to print the images on, etc. All in all, it has been a very humbling experience to let go of the full control and direction of a project.”

Printing in the Danish Countryside and the Overall Artistic Process

Concerning printing, Solkær prints at a spiritual ashram in the Danish countryside. Run my monks and nuns, Narayana Press (https://www.narayana.dk/) is considered the foremost printer in Europe for art and photography books.

“Great attention is put into the details of the books I make with them,” says Solkær. “I seek out different paper stocks with my graphic designer, Rasmus Koch. We try to find papers that make going through the book a tactile experience.”

“Certain paper stock, weight, and surface are more suitable for certain image types. Switching back and forth between different qualities makes for a more interesting reading sensation.”

No detail goes unnoticed throughout the process, from planning, photographing, editing, and printing.

There is also the culling process, which, in the case of Starling, started with about 60,000 images. The photographer says he then got that down to about 800. From there, he made small prints of each photo and began dividing them into visual categories.

“From here, I start laying them out on my studio floor and try to establish image pairs, chapters, flow, rhythm, and visual narratives. This process usually takes months. Little by little, the puzzle starts to fall into place. It is a very intuitive process that requires meditative attention,” he says.

This “meditative attention” also carries over to actually capturing the photos, too. Solkær has never moved or cloned a single bird in any of his starling photos. He must patiently wait for the right moment and, if it occurs, be ready to capture it.

There’s also something fascinating about how people can turn random or chaotic shapes into patterns, and these patterns into stories, a phenomenon called “pareidolia.”

“Such ethereal visions arise from the interplay of bird and sky, a conjuring of the mind and its longing for familiar forms. It highlights the power of human imagination and our capacity to find beauty and significance in the mesmerizing patterns created by these birds,” Solkær explains.

More From Søren Solkær

Søren Solkær’s new monograph, Starling, is available now through Solkær’s online shop. People can also purchase Black Sun and individual prints as posters there.

Solkær says he is working on three new projects right now, two of which involve traveling to Yemen and Bhutan. The third is a portrait project surrounding spiritual people. People can stay up to date with his work on Instagram.

“It is, however, very clear to me that I am not done photographing starlings,” he adds. “When winter approaches, I start searching for them. I doubt there will be a third starling book, but I have new exhibitions in the pipeline.”

Solkær’s work is currently on display at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle through March 10. And later this year, his starlings images will be showcased at a museum in Japan.

Image credits: All images © Søren Solkær

As a certified nerd (my day job is software engineering), I find I’m very comfortable photographing birds. They never complain about how they look, and they usually don’t attack me. For me, the only essential items are a reliable camera body, a battery grip – unless you’re using a camera with a built-in grip like the Nikon Z9 or the Nikon D6 – and a long lens. I carry lots of other stuff, but only because I’m a habitual over-packer. Oh, and a waterproof jacket. I live in Wales, after all… 

I’m not a very patient person, so my approach to wildlife photography is to wander around and hope for the best. This isn’t a technique, per se, but it does tend to work out quite well. Here in South Wales, we’re a bit lacking in larger mammals, so I’m mostly all about birds in flight. I just love the challenge.

I look for a few key elements when I capture a bird in flight. Ideally, the bird is flying towards the camera and is making some sort of eye contact. I then aim to capture a sharp head, blurry wing tips and a soft, creamy background.

My best shots

This mallard duck took off and flew so close to me at Slimbridge Wetland Centre that I had to rapidly reduce the focal length back to 320mm in order to fit him in the frame. Prime lenses tend to boast unrivaled image quality, but a zoom lens is useful when you have to react quickly in situations like this.

My main AF setup for capturing birds in flight is activated by half-pressing the shutter button to use subject detection, with wide-area AF set to the largest size. This means that even if a subject isn’t detected, such as if it’s moving very quickly or making an unusual shape, the AF still defaults to whatever’s closest to the camera and inside the focus area, which should be the bird. This usually means that I’m focusing much like using single-point AF, but with the added bonus of subject detection kicking in, just like it did in this photo.

Most of my favorite shots tend to be of common species, like this female mallard flying in the rain at Forest Farm in Cardiff. I love the effect rain brings to bird photos – and I’m not just saying that because I live in Wales. The moment I captured this shot can be seen on my YouTube video below – a single, two-second event in a 12-minute video of me wandering about in the rain. The Z9’s weather sealing held up superbly. 

To capture the shot I used the record button, next to the shutter button, to recall my emergency birds in flight settings. Manual mode with Auto ISO, 1/4000 sec, f/8, highlight-weighted metering, wide-area AF with subject detection.

This is a shelduck flying right at me. I’d like to claim my framing is always this perfect, but this is slightly cropped. At f/6.3 there was a risk that the camera would miss the focus on the eyes here, but to my surprise, it tracked them perfectly. No mean feat when a subject is traveling rapidly towards the camera!

My bird action photography tips

• Increase that shutter speed! As a general rule, I like to aim for 1/2,500 sec on a 20-ish megapixel body and 1/3,200 – 1/4,000 sec on anything higher resolution. Don’t worry about boosting your ISO – within your Nikon camera’s limits – to compensate.
• Ditch the tripod or monopod, if you can. A battery grip will help balance long lenses for more comfortable and successful handheld photographs. If you’re in a hide, that’s a different matter.
• Get out and shoot in the rain. I’d rarely get outside if I didn’t – that’s the Welsh climate for you – but it’s also great weather for ducks.

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The owner of a downtown Prince George nightclub has filed a court action against the City of Prince George, claiming lost revenue when his business was forced to close as a result of a natural gas explosion last summer that levelled a nearby building.

Trevor Sakamoto, whose company Encore Promotions Inc., owns Heartbreakers nightclub adjacent to the site of the explosion, is claiming the negligence of a city employee led to the blast at about 7 a.m. on Aug. 22 at 422 Dominion St.

The court action, filed on Wednesday, claims the defendant, a city bylaw officer, failed to take action when that person was informed by a female city parks worker in the morning the day before the explosion that there was a strong smell of gas coming from that building and she was told by the bylaw officer it would be dealt with.

The following morning the same parks worker, identified as 34-year-old Victoria Mcgivern, was working next to the building and again noticed a strong odour of gas coming from the building, so she used her cell phone to report it to Fortis BC.

As she was walking away from the entrance to the building it blew up in a fiery explosion. Mcgivern was blown off her feet and buried in debris, suffering a serious head injury, extensive burns and torn tendons in her hands, which required surgery. Three other people also suffered injuries in the blast.

Prince George RCMP later determined the explosion was caused by people who unlawfully entered the building to steal copper, which damaged a natural gas pipe.

“It was reasonable and foreseeable to the bylaw enforcement officers… that an extremely dangerous situation had arisen since it was reported to the City of Prince George that natural gas was being vented in the building and was readily detectable in the area,” according to the court file submitted by lawyer Roy Stewart.

It claims the bylaw officer was bound by duty to report the gas leak to Fortis and firefighters with Prince George Fire Rescue.

The plaintiff claims the explosion forced closure of the business pending repairs and rehabilitation of the surrounding area. It damaged the exterior cladding of the nightclub, the HVAC system and external machinery, broke windows and left toxic material inside the building. Several buildings in the area had broken windows and the UNBC Wood Innovation Centre suffered extensive fire damage on the side facing the explosion.

The nightclub was insured for some but not all of the damage. The policy considers the age and condition of the building at the time of the explosion and will not cover the full cost of repairs. Encore says the building cannot reopen until the repairs are completed and it is safe for invitees.

The nightclub owner is seeking damages caused by what is claimed as negligence demonstrated by the bylaw officer.