Variations on a Mid-summer Sunset

Experiments in the Morgan Arboretum

If you are in the Morgan Arboretum at sunset on Mid-Summer’s Day (21 June), and you look down “Birch Alley” from Chalet Pruche, then you will see the sun just touching the horizon exactly at the end of the forest ride to mark the end of the longest day. Quite how this fortuitous alignment happened is undoubtedly down to chance because otherwise the arbo would be organising a fund-raising evening around it and welcome late night visitors every year. We only discovered the alignment by chance.

The original

For example: I took the above picture a few years ago, it wasn’t last night - far too much rain, and anyway the arboretum is officially closed well before sunset, though you can walk in if careful about being seen. Not the best picture, I was scrambling to dial in the optimum camera settings as the sun moved faster than I did - lots of dynamic range to contend with. Nevertheless, you can well imagine what a uniquely splendid experience this was. Which is an evocative memory.

Now, off at a tangent. Over the weekend, I received an email from ChatGPT encouraging me to “get creative” and let them help me “improve” my images, What they really want is for me to pay them $20 a month for full access to their tools - not going to happen - but this stuff does intrigue me and I wondered what AI could make of this particularly difficult original? I would never pass this off as my own work, but it’s interesting to see what can be done today. For the first pass, I sampled asked the machine to tidy the image up and especially to try to focus on the sunset. Below is its response … perhaps it could make a suitable illustration to a fantasy novel, if you like that sort of thing?

And then, taking things one step further, I gave the electronic gnomes a prompt that asked them to create a digital watercolour including a raccoon, because why not, and they came back with this illustration that is eminently suitable for a child’s story book.

---

For next summer, this is where you want to be …