On a monday I made this photo at a playground, knowing this was a perspective that does show the toy larger than life, with a purpose.

The next phase is to ask an artificial intelligence model to describe this image, and see what kind of images those descriptions produce.

You can ask ChatGPT to describe what is on a picture, and even have it formulate it as a prompt for a generate ai model. Also in Midjourney there is the /describe command.
For now I think I am spending the last couple of weeks using it via Discord. It has been used as a fairly easy and scalable solution, but the full-fledged Midjourney website is already available for power users. First the people with more than 10,000 generations, then the 5,000 (I thought I crossed that threshold, but no), it can not take long before it is open for all paying customers.

I asked Midjourney to describe the photo, and one of the first images was this one, from the prompt: advertising photo of a yellow dump truck sitting in the sand, in the style of toy camera effects, weathered materials, childhood arcadias, reefwave, steel/iron frame construction, golden ratio

I added elements like the golden ratio myself, after some experimenting.

I used Magnific.ai to enlarge the image and add additional detail:

It might not be super obvious, but if you see the details, it crosses the line of artificiality for me. I think the casual observer will not think about it not being real.

Playing around I started changing the words of the prompt to create variations, and I stumbled upon a theme to make this a collection I could upload to Wirestock.

That theme is the name of the collection “Lost Dreams”. I tried to create images depicting toy cars, that are left on the beach. Like a child played with them, and something caused them to just leave the toy on the beach, where it is deteriorating in the elements.
At the same time, the pictures show the dreams we have when we are young. How we will have cool cars and park them on the beach, watching the sunset with the love of our lives.

And those dreams are also childish dreams we lost… A feeling of nostalgia, that can be positive or negative, depending of one’s experiences.

The idea of creating these kind of collections is of course to try to think ahead how people that use stock photos are searching for images. Say you are looking for images that show the emotion of forgotten dreams, this xouls dir .

Take a look at the collection that I eventually put together, changing words, color-correcting the resulting images, adding and removing parts and sometimes forcing that golden ration that is in the prompt by creating extra background in Photoshop, or even zooming out and creating stuff with Generative Fill all around the place.