Stuff 131: Smile

By JJ Atwell

Pictures

It seems to me that a basic part of being a CD is the need to have pictures of ourselves. You know, if you don’t have hundreds of pictures of your femme self stashed away somewhere, you should turn in your CD card.

Well, perhaps that’s an exaggeration—not that I would stoop to such things just to keep you reading my musings.

The Woman in the Picture

It’s probably obvious that the first step in documenting your girl self is getting a good picture in the first place. The easiest way is to take one with your cell phone, perhaps using a mirror to capture your whole outfit.

The problem with mirror selfies is that the phone is visible and may block part of your outfit. You can remedy this by holding the phone off to one side, but that can be awkward and result in an unnatural pose.

Another issue is that you may capture surroundings you don’t want to share. For example, I took this picture in my bedroom using my iPhone and a full-length mirror. I like to have a picture of every outfit I wear when dressed. If nobody else is around to take it for me, I settle for a mirror selfie like the one you see here. It serves its purpose as documentation, but it isn’t visually interesting.

The Software

Fortunately, software can fix these issues. For example, I took this image in the mirror before one of our outings. The picture was taken in my bedroom, and I didn’t want that background in the final image, so I used ChatGPT to remove it, leaving only me in the picture.

Not bad, but perhaps it would be better without the phone in the frame. I asked ChatGPT to remove the phone and got this result. It looks pretty natural to me. Then I began wondering whether I could use a few more curves and a better pose.

Going Beyond

Playing with photo-editing software opens some new avenues for experimentation. How would you look if that top were cut a bit lower? What outfit might suit you better? All these things are possible with a program like ChatGPT, starting with the same image and a few simple prompts.

Here are some interesting suggestions, all created by ChatGPT. I love having these inspirations for future outings.

Please remember, though, that AI is no substitute for HI—human intelligence. Use your own judgment to decide what works best for you.

I’ll Be Back

The photo at the upper right of today’s Stuff is a stylized picture of me based on a real image from a GNO at Hamburger Mary’s. It was created using ChatGPT.

Comments are welcome either here on the blog or by email to Jenn6nov at-sign gmail dot com. JJ is always looking for more Stuff, so let me know what you would like to read about.

Wearing Paige

Jaloo femulating in the 2018 Brazilian film Paradise Lost.