Past, Current, and Future Big Events in Photography
Should we do things simply because we can?
December 2, 2009

When it comes to photography I devote myself exclusively to finding, capturing, interpreting, and printing still images of subjects in nature. When it comes to equipment and materials I do a lot of research and buy what I believe to be the best I can afford for my purpose. I embrace new technologies, but only when they can improve what I do by increasing the quality of my work or solving some problem that I experience.
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Photography's digital revolution left me doing the same things I've always done, but now I'm doing them in very different ways and with better results. In all it was a pretty good revolution, but I'm also glad it's over. Digital cameras, related software, and printers, are all now mature products that change in small, incremental, and predictable ways from year to year. I think printers were the last thing to truly mature, after finally gaining the ability to print "darkroom quality" images on other than matt papers within the last few years.
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The current big event in digital photography is the convergence of still and video technologies. Basically, camera makers started adding video capability to their still cameras because most components required for the video were already there, not because digital SLR users were demanding video. If I had any interest in producing videos, or could somehow figure out a way to use this convergence to help me make better still images, I'd be very excited. As it is, video capability in a still camera is as useful to me as a potato peeler that folds out of the battery compartment. The fact is that capturing raw video is just a small step in producing something that anyone outside the photographer's family would want to watch. Video production is a complex art requiring specialized skills and equipment that have little in common with those required for still photography. According to the credits, Canon's 5D Mark II sample video involved 12 people, 13 lenses, and a 5D Mark II. And don't forget, you can't just take someone's music and dub it into your video. You need to buy the rights to use it, or compose, play, and record your own. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure wedding photographers and a few others will put the new video capabilities to great use, but most will just ignore it after discovering they're not videographers. Fortunately, the video capabilities of latest cameras can be ignored about as easily as those on "point and shoot" cameras, which have been capable of creating video clips for years. I hope it stays that way.
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Thinking about what future technology convergences may give us, it's clear that digital cameras already contain most of what’s needed to do many things beyond still and video photography. All cameras contain a clock that they use to time and date stamp image files. Adding a date/time display to cameras would be a no-brainer. In fact, digital cameras could easily provide an alarm clock function and an appointment calendar too. People already geo-tag digital images with GPS data, so why not build GPS into cameras and let them also provide maps and directions to favorite locations on their LCDs? Several cameras now have wireless capabilities for downloading photos, so it's not a far stretch to think about browsing the Internet on the camera's LCD too. Audio capabilities for recording audio notes relating to images has been around for years, and now cameras record in stereo sound to go along with their new HD video capabilities. Heck, just add a headphone jack and you could play MP3 files loaded on a CF or SD card! The powerful processors in today's cameras could easily run applications to do everything from identifying bird calls to calculating restaurant tips. Hey, if we could also use them to make phone calls...
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Happy potato peeling!

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P.S. I heard a rumor that the Canon 1Ds Mark IV will probably be released in January of 2011, will have in excess of 30 megapixels, and may be capable of removing apple cores.

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Copyright 2009 Dean M. Chriss
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