Raymond Kofi Appiah is a second-year graduate student from Ghana spending his semester in Fort Collins studying sociology with a focus in criminal justice and green criminology through Colorado State University’s International Student and Scholar Services.

While pursuing his master’s degree, Appiah works as both a graduate teaching assistant and research assistant on campus. He hopes to continue researching environmental sustainability and global crimes to attain his Ph.D. in the future. 

“I have been working with some international agencies like (the United Nations Population Fund) and UNICEF that deal with contraceptive distribution and adolescent reproductive health, and I’m trying to proceed to work with some of those key elements like intimate partner violence,” Appiah said. 

“I do photography for fun. I love to be behind the camera and take pictures of people, things, the environment, nature, everything I see that is attractive.” –Raymond Kofi Appiah, international CSU student

Appiah chose to join the international program because he wanted to focus on doing research and meeting people in his field, but the benefits of studying abroad have gone beyond academics for him.

“I have gained a lot in terms of academics, but I’ve actually been able to achieve quite a number in terms of finding myself,” Appiah said. “I’ve been meeting people, going on hikes and going camping. I never thought I would be going hiking as a team activity here.”

“Fort Collins is a great city to be in,” Appiah said. “I like the environment here. Everyone has been very welcoming. … My cousins and my friends back home want to apply here as well, and I tell them, ‘Yes, go ahead. Fort Collins is a great city to be in, and CSU is pretty welcoming to students from around the world.’”

Traveling abroad is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most students. ISSS offers programs in the fall, spring and summer semesters for almost every major. 

“While each student experience is unique, we are committed to offering every CSU Ram access to a global education,” said Emily Kilburg, communications manager for CSU’s Office of International Programs. “Whether that’s through an education abroad program, attending our World Unity Fair or by listening to an international speaker at our Global (Engagement) Distinguished Lecture series.”

Appiah found his place through the ISSS’s social events and the Black/African American Cultural Center on campus. The people he’s met through these organizations help him feel at home, but in his free time, he uses art to tap into his roots.

Before coming to CSU, Appiah wanted to major in photography and now enjoys photographing Colorado’s natural environment. 

“I wanted to be an aerial photographer, but that didn’t happen because drones are now stuck in that position,” Appiah said. “I do photography for fun. I love to be behind the camera and take pictures of people, things, the environment, nature — everything I see that is attractive. I also love music; music is like my therapy. I will listen to any genre, but lately I listen to Afro beats, Ghana rap, hip-hop, highlife to get in touch with my roots.”

Fort Collins’ diverse art and musical scene as well as CSU’s art students often allow international students of any major to feel at home through creativity and community connection. 

“The arts department is a wonderful place to learn about art and grow your artistic practices,” said Aspen Crawford, third-year art major. “It challenges you to be independent in idea generation and execution with guidance from your peers and faculty. I was a transfer student, and the art department at CSU far exceeds the education and training I was receiving at my previous institution.”

“I don’t like to brag, and I want my work to speak for itself, but I gave a presentation on environmental authoritarianism and how China’s investment in Africa and Latin America is impacting the environment,” Appiah said. “I did it with a team, and we won the Global Impact Award as well. It has not published, but it was a great showcase that I wouldn’t have been a part of if not here.” 

Reach Sophia Masia at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @sophie_masia.

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It was love at first sight when photographer Harry Gruyaert first visited Morocco, and he has been trying to capture that initial impact ever since.

Morocco is the new book by Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert, in which he captures the enchanting land of the country it’s named after. Enamored by the splendid harmony between form and color, people and nature, he has been photographing there since the early 1970s. Morocco provides an outsider’s view of the country and how it has developed and changed through the last 5 decades. 

• See our guide for the best camera for street photography 

Harry Gruyaert is a Belgian photographer best known for his images of India, Morocco, and Egypt as well as of the west of Ireland. He has been part of Magnum Photos since joining in 1982, and has published several books. In 1976 he won the Kodak Prize for his body of work created in Morocco, and the subsequent published book.

Now considered ‘street photography’, Gruyaert captured the hustle and bustle of Moroccan life, from the busy streets of Marrakech and Essaouira, to the Atlas Mountains and rural desert landscape. Light and shadow play a significant part in Gruyaert’s aesthetic, enhancing the colors and adding a cinematic atmosphere to the scene. The color contained in this book is a character of its own, providing life to the 150 images. 

Gruyaert’s camera of choice was, much like other great photographers of the time, a Leica M with a 50mm prime lens. Most likely to have used several of the series throughout his career, he created many works with the Leica M6 coupled with the unmistakable colors of Kodak Kodachrome film. Kodachrome is renowned for its saturated colors, and no doubt played a huge part in capturing the vibrant images in this book.  

Guided by ‘his innate curiosity and desire to understand different realities,’ he wanted to reflect the importance of family, community, and faith to the people of Morocco. Photographing as an outsider enables a new perspective on daily life. Something that may seem ordinary and every day to us may seem fascinating to others. This form of social anthropology is curated in this book and showcases a side of life in Morrocco over the last five decades. 

Morocco by Harry Gruyaert is published by Thames & Hudson and will be available on February 1, 2024, for the price of $65 / £50. More of Harry Gruyaert’s work can also be seen in the new book Magnum Magnum, also published by Thames & Hudson, showcasing work from all Magnum photographers. 

Harry Gruyaert shot this project with a Leica film camera, if it has inspired you to find out more see our guides on the best Leica cameras, the best Leica M lenses, and the best film for 35mm

Your sports photographers Jim Shannon and Steve Valenti are to be complimented for the terrific photos that they had taken for the “Scenes from Thanksgiving week football” spread in the…

Local photographer, Danielle Jorae, always knew she wanted to be an artist and a writer one day. Her dream has finally become a reality with the recent publication of her book, “Lighthouses of Michigan – Lower Peninsula”

Jorae owns a small business, Reflections Photography, which focuses on portrait photography. She wanted to expand her business to highlight her other photo projects, so in 2021 she established a second photography business, Michigan Reflections, which focuses on Michigan landscapes. In growing this side of her business, she found herself traveling the state to get the perfect photos which has propelled her into achieving her dream of publishing a book.

“I’ve always wanted to publish a book,” Jorae said. “I’ve been writing stories since I was very young and even received writing awards throughout my school years. Being an artist has always come naturally to me so it made sense to use my creativity to develop a book that celebrates the state I love to travel so much.”

Jorae has been photographing places around Michigan for a long time but the development of Michigan Reflections in 2021 is what really pushed her to go further. “I began sharing the images I have taken around Michigan to followers on Facebook and Instagram and got wonderful feedback from all over the state” said Jorae “It has been a great way to show people what Michigan has to offer.”

“Michigan has the most lighthouses of any state, so photographing them seemed like a great way to celebrate the uniqueness and history of Michigan.” Jorae continued “I quickly decided that I was going to visit all that I could. But there are some lighthouses in Michigan that are not accessible so my goal became to visit (and climb) all the lighthouses accessible by land to get photographs of them.”

In 2022, as Jorae was close to reaching her goal of photographing these lighthouses, she ran across documents from her childhood that reminded her how much she wanted to publish a book someday. “It was in that moment that I decided I knew what I needed to do.” Said Jorae “There was no question in my mind that I needed to publish a book with these images and make a piece that allowed the artist and the writer in me to collide in the most special way.”

Jorae has plans to keep traveling and publish more books in the future.

The book is available for purchase locally at a small discount directly through Danielle here.

It can also be found on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Follow Michigan Reflections:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michiganreflections

Instagram: instagram.com/michigan_reflections

Website: https://daniellejorae.wixsite.com/michiganreflections

Follow Reflections Photography:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reflectionsphotosite

Instagram: instagram.com/reflectionsphotosite

Website: www.reflectionsphotosite.com

Courtesy photos.

Amazon’s recently announced Titan generative AI isn’t quite the same as consumer-facing image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney, but the Titan Image Generator may hold implications for professional photographers working with corporate clients.

Businesses that use it can take images of their own products and have the generative AI swap out settings, backgrounds, or complementary visual elements through prompts. It can also produce entirely original images.

For its part, Amazon says photographers have nothing to fear, and that the Titan Image Generator will supplement rather than replace the original content photographers and creative digital artists produce for their clients.

“The [Titan Image Generator] would really be meant to augment what photographers are always doing because, and based on my observations and what I’ve seen at the enterprise level, is most people want new and original content, especially when they’re looking at photographing new events or new people. They’re going to still want photographers,” says Sherry Marcus, Director of Applied Science in the Generative AI Services Organization at AWS in an exclusive interview with PetaPixel.

That may also depend on the kind of photography brands or corporations are looking for. Marcus sees content creation within advertising as the biggest use case right now, where industries with the “largest appetite” for ads would be interested in how Titan’s multimodal AI works to create images supplementing their own assets. A brand trying to figure out where to place images can adapt said images based on, for instance, what’s on the website, what user preferences are, as well as regional or seasonal imperatives.

Teaching the AI the Ropes

Being a multimodal generative AI platform, Amazon is teaching its Titan Image Generator with a lot of data from both images and text to learn and spot similar images and be more precise in delivering results. The “secret sauce” is in trying to predict what the next words or images should be in the model, which is a key element in how the AI is being trained. Humans supervise the fine-tuning, which is basically sets of questions and answers. So, for example, if the request is a picture of a penguin on a surfboard in Hawaii, variations should appear that are very specific to the request.

“When you search for something in natural language, we encode the content both in text and in the image, which is very powerful in getting the right answer and generating all of those components,” she says. “In the prompt, you can get it more specific and say, ‘The sun shines from X angle,’ or ‘Give me a picture at dusk or 5 pm.’ It’ll look at the text and know that dusk and 5 pm may be the same things and then look at images associated with that.”

For advertisers, that kind of granularity without setting up multiple photo shoots could be a cost-effective way to adapt a campaign for different markets. That is, at least in part, because brands can use the multimodal image generator with their own assets, like blending in an existing product photo with a unique background, scene, character, or visual complement that wouldn’t always necessitate setting up a separate shoot to get similar results.

Marcus also notes there are safeguards in place to deal with copyright infringement and inappropriate content that will include invisible watermarks. These will confirm images were generated by AI, while the image generator will try to create different images whenever two users use the same exact prompt.

“In that sense, you still might need someone to take the photos but you just don’t need to necessarily put them on location,” she says.

“Brands want authenticity but they also really want to be able to do things quickly. I think generative AI is providing that capability to do the touch-ups much more quickly but I don’t see brands really wanting to get rid of that authenticity, that realism, that spirit of the moment that you get from doing live photography.”

An ‘Accelerant’ and Not a Replacement

In other words, it would be possible to set up photo shoots in a studio and then work on the visual elements within the image using tools like the Titan Image Generator. It’s not clear if Amazon received that kind of feedback from companies using its cloud and AI development services, but cutting costs is often a page in the corporate playbook when new technologies emerge.

Amazon believes the image generator will help all users at the enterprise level use the capability more safely and securely to help accelerate their business objectives — without “taking away individuals’ jobs.” It’s more of an “accelerant” to make them more productive and resourceful, she adds.

Plus, there are differences between product photography and event photography that show the limits of what the AI can do. It can’t generate images about a live event it knows nothing about, including those attending, much less do it in real-time like an on-site photographer could. And while a brand can utilize the AI to complement its own images, Titan can’t pull from a brand’s own image and product resources to create something that way. Copyrighted brands, logos, likenesses, and assets are untouchable that way. First, you take the original image and then plug in the AI to work with it.

“My experience is that brands will still want to be able to take live photos of their products and events in different ways, in a very realistic format,” says Marcus. “Many multimedia companies want to be able to have their own brand associated with content creation, so this is another tool in the toolbox to act as an augmentation.”

Titan Image Generator is currently available as a preview in the United States and only in English, though Amazon also announced that it is looking to expand availability to other markets and languages going forward.