I read with interest Robert Rittmuller’s article “Photography’s Future is Computational” and I’m not sure what to think. For a professional photographer he is right, it’s more than preserving memories, it’s creating something epic.
I thought back to when I was in the Navy and graduated from an instamatic camera to my Pentax Spotmatic 35mm SLR and how I was going to take the kind of photos that National Geographic would die for.
No one told me there was more to the camera than point and click, I would actually have to learn how to “use” it to produce the kind of photos I imagined.
This was long before Youtube, the internet and the easy access to any and all information or instruction that is now at our fingertips. It took about a year to learn about F stops, exposures and the effect it had on depth and how to enhance photos with various filters. An expensive process on a seaman’s pay, but worth it to me.
Fast forward, one Christmas my wife gave me a Pentax 12 mega pixel digital camera, and my first foray into digital photography. I was not impressed with it at all. While the resolution left a lot to be desired, at least you didn’t have to scan your photo prints to get them into that newfangled program to try and fix what you didn’t like.
Then came Christmas 2017 and my wife gave me a Canon Rebel SLR digital camera. This camera is amazing, from the ability to use different resolutions to setting up your camera to take photos from a remote location using a smartphone app while your a hundred feet away and posting them on social media, all without having to sit at a computer, I am in awe of all this technology. I will be taking a course just to understand, use and enjoy taking pictures again.
Which brings me to my point, to me photography is a challenge, a quest if you will, to find the perfect shot. I love Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and the way it has enhanced our lives in so many seen and unseen ways that the average person probably has no idea how much it influences our lives.
Each new technical innovation brings new opportunities by enhancing our creativity one exciting step after another while reducing the mundane steps that we used to take to get us there. I am looking forward to the day when I can take a picture with the blink of my right eye, then crop, color correct and post all in a blink of my left eye.
I am interested in what you think about this, so please let me know your thoughts in the comment section.
