Ian Tan

Ian Tan

Cameras see more than we can

Whenever you see interesting clouds, take a photo with your phone and you might surprise yourself. Camera sensors can capture details that are hard for the human eye to perceive. This morning, I saw these wonderful clouds, but the sky…

Newsletter 26

I receive daily email alerts on discounted Kindle ebooks, and my latest purchase for $1.99 is “The Big Five” by Dr Sanjiv Chopra. I was stunned to read this: “Coffee appears to offer a great variety of benefits, including substantial…

Midjourney Omni-Reference

Midjourney has been rolling out several new features to fight back against ChatGPT 4o’s powerful imaging capabilities. A new feature is “Omni-Reference” that lets you upload photos of “characters, objects, vehicles, or non-human creatures”. I uploaded an older profile photo…

Enjoy your work

I was jogging at Bishan Park today when I saw beautiful sunrays streaming through the tree branches in the foggy air. I stopped at several points to take photos, and I was delighted to come upon this glowing scene of…

A letter to the graduates of 2025

This week, as I bade farewell to the NTU undergrads I supervised for their FYPs (final year project), I gave them some advice on how to deal with entering the adult world of 2025. Here’s a fuller version: Dear young…

Google Veo 2 hands-on

I finally got to use Google’s Veo 2 to generate AI videos and it’s better than Runway, Kling, Hailuo and Sora. 🔷 It’s faithful to your prompts What you type is what you get. I used my test prompts such…

Newsletter 25: Apply vibrant paint

Painting on a canvas scares me. Every paint stroke requires a dose of confidence because I never know how I might mess things up. This is especially true with watercolors where you can’t paint over the same area several times…