....the camera of the future isn’t from the past...

I abhorre smartphones, instagram, facebook, digital photography and all the social media. In my eyes, it is a de-personification of the human being. You do not count, only the crowd counts, the instant "cute" or "hip" thing, that you cheer, and then forget in a heartbeat.
Not everybody wants to become a McDonald burger.

like any business arrangement, both the consumer and the company see benefits from entering into an arrangement. with social media, i believe the opposite of what you just said. it lets individuals stand out and connect to other people where it was not possible before. it's about making connections and relationships where it was not possible before. of course the dark side is how companies aggregate the data and sell it 😉
 
Who cares? Some of us blissfully ignorant will be printing silver halide in the darkroom without any regard for the "future" of photography while the gaggle of barking seals that is the "public" will be shooting 80 mgpx files and uploading them to social media via the ether.

You'll be blissfully ignorant until your paper supply and chemistry is no longer available.
 
I do feel like we're using cameras which are stuck in the past. I don't really mind - I like the past, but we could have so much more. Why are cameras that control everything limited to the techniques we used when everything was mechanical? Why can't my camera move the aperture while the shutter is open? Why can't it move the focus 10ft exactly while the shutter is open? Why can't I pick a "black" on the lcd and have the exposure pegged to keeping that black?

There is so much potential in being able to control the optical system on the millisecond level, but no one is taking advantage of it. We have thinking machines that are one million times faster than us, and we use them to emulate what gears and springs did perfectly well.
 
The present does not preclude the past. In fact it depends on it. To pretend that "the new" will always and in all circumstances replace "the old" is patently nonsense. Once you accept this, the observation that "....the camera of the future isn’t from the past..." is merely a statement of the obvious. Also, of course, any speculation about the future discounts what we don't know yet -- which may change things far more than what we already know, or may prompt us to look to the past.

Cheers,

R.
 
I take your point, but I'd say the conversations here are a lot deeper, in general, than what you see on the social media websites. And -- for sure, the subject matter here is almost by definition not "the instant 'cute' or 'hip' thing." Not among the majority of the membership, anyway.
 
You'll be blissfully ignorant until your paper supply and chemistry is no longer available.

Never going to happen🙂 The supplies may become more limited, they may become more expensive, but they are never going to disappear.

Even with Facebook, there are still people scrapbooking:angel:
 
Quote [: ...WiFi, GPS and a touch screen are built-in, and its open source software allows me to launch Instagram (or whatever app is the soup du jour) and have the camera automatically pair with my phone so I don’t have to do everything twice. The future uses technology and design to free us from analog constraints....]

LOL, you make yourself a slave of gadgets, of instant availability everywhere at anytime of the day. A lot of people even sleep with their smartphone on the nightstand. Amazing how people claim "freedom" and are not able to see, that they are completely addicted to keeping track with the social media world.
I don't twitter, I'm not on FB and don't use Instagram and I do not store my data in the cloud either. To each their own 😎 😀.
 
Y'know, reading articles like that just made me realize that my view on photography is very different than these writers'.

A camera that mesh well with smartphone, I got it, that's my idea too. But at the same time, when I wander around with my old manual rangefinder (or SLR or TLR), I am happy in the most simplistic way possible. I'm content. So I do want a camera that still acts, feels, and reacts like a camera.

And before you ask, no, I'm not 50 and I am not a white guy. But I do hang out with a few of them, and they are nothing like what these writers portray them to be.
 
Quote [: ...WiFi, GPS and a touch screen are built-in, and its open source software allows me to launch Instagram (or whatever app is the soup du jour) and have the camera automatically pair with my phone so I don’t have to do everything twice. The future uses technology and design to free us from analog constraints....]

LOL, you make yourself a slave of gadgets, of instant availability everywhere at anytime of the day. A lot of people even sleep with their smartphone on the nightstand. Amazing how people claim "freedom" and are not able to see, that they are completely addicted to keeping track with the social media world.
I don't twitter, I'm not on FB and don't use Instagram and I do not store my data in the cloud either. To each their own 😎 😀.
There are quite a few different definitions of "freedom" and "being freed from technology". I get freed from it by refusing to use the bits I neither like nor need, while using the bits I like or need. Your phrase "slave of gadgets" certainly reflects the way I see a number of those who claim to be "free".

Cheers,

R.
 
The smartphone is on the nightstand because it's also an alarm clock.

Camera design has been a conga line and has missed a few functionality opportunities.

not to mention flashlight, GPS, encyclopedia, TOPO library, Bird, plant and mineral ref, portal to incredible images if tumblr is tuned right, way to annoy important people (twitter) camera, video camera, etc etc etc.

IMHO the iphone 5 is the first really great one. It's the first one I use alot. 🙂

funny I rarely use the camera
 
Cameras are still utilizing shutter speeds and apertures and a capture medium. Until there is another way to make a photo on the go with a different device that has different parameters and a different way of capturing, I think cameras are going to still look like cameras. Sure, they can dumb them down and make them extremely complicated... but that's been done before as well. The cellphone? It's still a camera. It's nothing new other than now it is a multifunction computer with a camera function and the still camera for photographers is a computer with one function (or maybe two i.e. video).
 
And of course we'd all MUCH rather have a (not-very-good) camera combined with a (not-very-good) alarm clock and a phone that frankly seems slightly harder to use than the ones from 10 years ago.

What is the current life of a combination phone-camera-alarm clock-tea trolley-government tracking device? My 23-year-old daughter seems to think it reasonable to replace them every 2-3 years. Is this the case?

Cheers,

R.
 
Y'know, reading articles like that just made me realize that my view on photography is very different than these writers'.

A camera that mesh well with smartphone, I got it, that's my idea too. But at the same time, when I wander around with my old manual rangefinder (or SLR or TLR), I am happy in the most simplistic way possible. I'm content. So I do want a camera that still acts, feels, and reacts like a camera.

And before you ask, no, I'm not 50 and I am not a white guy. But I do hang out with a few of them, and they are nothing like what these writers portray them to be.

How true to all!

Read this - White guy photography....

http://petapixel.com/2013/11/06/white-guy-photography/
 
The principal irritating thing about that article is its assumption of unity. The camera of the future. It's as silly an assumption as the person of the future. As though there'll only be one. The second irritating thing about the article is an assumption that this is an exercise in nostalgia. A photographer can make choices, at the time of image capture, that will influence the resulting image. In the film days, those choices were choice of film (lots of things bundled up here), choice of lens, filters, choice of aperture, choice of shutter speed, focus. A photographer today can still choose aperture, shutter speed and focus (or perhaps "exposure duration" is a better way to look at it), lens & filters. Film choice has been disaggregated into things like ISO, White Balance, RAW/JPG, &c). He doesn't seem to be imagining a world in which those choices don't persist, only a world in which the ways those choices are presented to the photographer change.

There are, and for a long time have been, different ways of presenting those choices to the photographer. As dedicated dials, as menu options, as exposure programs (modified by various choices of metering mode and exposure compensation settings), focus programs, camera modes &c.

It seems silly to me though, to say that one way of relating to the camera -- of having choices presented -- through a set of rings controlling aperture, exposure duration, and focus -- is "the past" or nostalgia. Permitting simple direct control of things that change the appearance of the final image strikes me as a not especially time bound concept and it is not especially surprising, given that photography has been around for more than a century, that one of the ways of allowing that control that we already have (shutter speed dial, aperture ring, focus ring) is as much of the future as it is of the past.
 
Back
Top Bottom