Today's post is somewhat unusual for this blog of mine inasmuch as although it does include some AI-generated artwork (in the form of four short video clips, as will be seen later here), its main theme is very different, as I'll now explain.
As well as being a longstanding biker, I am also an enthusiastic collector of motorbike/motorcycling memorabilia - everything from books, postcards, models, figurines, biker jackets, photographs & much more. So it was that in or around October 2022, while idly perusing motorbike collectabilia listings on ebay, I noticed one for a small vintage b/w photograph (measuring just 5" x 3") of a biker sitting proudly on what I'm guessing may well have been his first motorbike, judging from its modest size coupled with the fact that in terms of age he looked to be somewhere around 20 to 22-ish. The listing contained no information regarding the photo, such as who the biker was, where it had been snapped, etc, other than a claim that it probably dated back to around 1980 & was therefore vintage. At first, I bristled at the claim that a photo from the early 1980s was vintage, until I suddenly realised that if it did date from that period, this photo was actually around 40 years old! How time flies - it seems like only yesterday that the 1980s decade was right now!
The mystery biker photo (henceforth MBP for convenience) had been placed on sale by a photograph dealer based in the USA, but even when international postage was added to its total price (as I live in England, not the USA) it was still very inexpensively priced, so I decided to buy this picture as a motorbike-themed curiosity to add to my collection. When it arrived, I placed it inside a small but sturdy silver picture frame, which has stood upright ever since on the mantelpiece of my home's collectabilia room.
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Since obtaining it, I have sought on several occasions to identify the person in this MBP, by using various online picture image search programs, such as Google Search & Tin Eye, but I've achieved no success at all. Consequently, I recently decided to produce the present post about this enigmatic image and upload it here, just in case someone reads it and recognises the MBP as being either a snap of themselves from way back in 1980 or of someone they know. I would so like this to happen, because there is something unutterably poignant about a small photo depicting a newbie biker who is so clearly very proud of his little motorbike but who for reasons unknown subsequently discarded or somehow mislaid the photo, which has since found its way into the stock of an ebay photograph seller and thence into my motorbike memorabilia collection across the other side of the pond here in England. How gratifying it would be, therefore, to be able to place a name to the biker in this MBP, and perhaps even to be able to bring its existence to his attention, if he's still around (he'd be about 65 years old now).
So, let's see if anyone reading this post can offer any assistance in my quest for a satisfactory solution to the mystifying case of the MBP - over to you!
As for the AI link to this post: here are four video clips, each of which is 5 seconds long, that I recently created using Grok Imagine's video creation program, employing the MBP as my visual prompt. As I'll explain in more detail in a future post here, this particular AI image-generation program is very interesting (and new to mre) as it requires no verbal prompt at all in order to generate a video, only a photo or some other illustration as a visual prompt. This measn that the person using the program has absolutely no control or involvement with regard to the video's generation and content, so it's always both fascinating & tantalising to present it with a picture and see what it then depicts in the resulting video.
Here are the four vids that I created using the MBP as Grok Imagine's visual prompt:
More of my AI-created biker images next time!
Plus: please click here to access a chronological listing of fully clickable links to all galleries uploaded by me on this blog. NB - all four of the videos included in this page's gallery were created by me, RebelBikerDude, using the AI video-generation program Grok Imagine, for non-commercial, entertainment purposes only, and do not feature any real-life persons or copyrighted characters.