Back in the dawn of digital cameras it was clear to me that they would rule. (Serious photographers around me vehemently disagreed at the time.) It was fun thinking about what future things might be enabled when image capture was mediated by a little computer inside the camera.
Now we have cameras that can go back in time to take a shot that was missed and cameras that can recognize and focus in on faces, cameras that know precisely where you are, cameras that can transmit images over the air, cameras with large, sensitive sensors that they can almost see in the dark, cameras that illuminate with heat and can see in the dark, and cameras that can record video in HD.
It seems like digital photography has reached a peak. The quality is impeccable. Are we done with the radical breakthroughs?
Of course not, silly! What kind of a blog do you think this is?
There is a feature I have been looking forward to that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in a camera. See, 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.
HDR image (click to enlarge)
If you have the time and inclination you could take a couple of different exposures and sew them together. This has become known as high dynamic range imaging.
But 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, without all the messy darkroom chemicals.
This is just one new avenue for innovation in image capture. There are many more. Stereoscopic point-and-clicks? Cameras that can infer a 3D scene and automatically stitch together a 3D model? Infrared cameras that can see in the dark? Tiny lapel pin cameras that capture our life every few seconds?
Readers, what future digital camera innovations you foresee?
I’d love to see HDR built in, that would be very cool. I used to have a camera that allowed multiple exposures (a little fuji), which made for some great abstracts.
The biggest feature I want is to be able to shoot in dark rooms. My SLR (30D) does ~iso3200, some do 6400, but I’d love much much higher. 25600? 102400? (and no grain
Oh yea, and infrared
Paul.
Here is another small but useful feature that I haven’t seen yet: “everything bracketing”. Exposure bracketing is common, white balance bracketing sometimes. But it’d be interesting to set a range of any parameter: aperture, shutter, zoom, ISO, flash level. Even more than one at a time.
Then you could press and hold and have it take 9 or 16 photos for you in quick succession. Then you could choose which image captures the scene perfectly, and adopt those settings for subsequent shots.
Especially useful would be combinations of shutter & aperture that are all properly exposed.
For high-contrast photography, it would give shots metered to the overall scene, the brightest areas, and the darkest areas. (A precursor to the in-camera HDR concept that was the original idea of this post)
Right now you can only set the digital ISO value for the entire shot.
Could the sensor allowed for variable sensitivity across the image? Perhaps we could get higher dynamic range shots with each exposure.
Just a thought.
Long exposures of several seconds to several minutes require a lot of trial and error.
What if you could see the long exposure develop before your eyes, right on the LCD screen?
You could press a remote shutter release once to start the shot and again to stop it when the results on the screen match the desired effect.
The settings used for the exposure could then be fixed and tweaked for the next, more precise shot.