A year ago, I pined for more powerful control over my camera:
With a high contrast scene like a face against a bright daytime sky, you have to choose between detail in the shadows — your friend’s face — and highlights in the bright areas — like the cool billowy clouds. [..] Is there anything to stop the camera from capturing multiple exposures and doing this stitching for you within the camera? Then you could have Ansel Adams shots at the touch of a button
A team at Stanford has demonstrated this feature (see the video halfway down the page).
Plus those idea robbers also stole another idea straight from my head: the ability to program the camera for all kinds of tricks.
However, their model is open-source software, and so it will be limited in use to real programmers. This is nice, but I want Nikon and Canon to let any computer-literate person write – or visually snap together – scripts to be executed by the camera. (That’s the new idea to steal.)
This is an enabling technology that would let the end-user do all kinds of tricks:
- Adjust settings & preferences according to your rules (If it’s in Manual mode, fix the ISO. If it’s in Aperture priority mode, use Auto-ISO. If the flash is on, drop ISO to 100.)
- Set up a lightpainting program: blink the light for 3 seconds to indicate the start of the program, then open the shutter for 60 seconds while you paint, then beep for 5 seconds so you can pose, then take a flash image to capture you.
- Baby or lightning capture: With the camera on a tripod pre-bufferring video, and when a spike in lighting happens or the baby finally laughs, let the user press the remote to begin capture a few seconds earlier
- Wildlife capture: Pre-buffer video, and when motion is detected, start recording it from a second earlier. Then capture stills every 10 seconds for the next minute, then wait for motion
- so much more
The scripts would be sharable and rated online among the community. Serious photographers are a techie, enthusiastic bunch and this creative capability would go over nicely.
Photographers, what tricks would you teach your gear if it were easy and fun?
Apparently there is a Canon Hackers Development Kit, which some MIT students used to create a rig that would take pictures every 5 minutes until the card was full. They attached it to a weather balloon, and got some nice edge-of-space picts.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/