On one of the new Sony digital cameras, you can choose a setting that will prevent the camera from taking a picture unless it detects a smile on the face of your subject.
We have reached the ultimate of the nanny corporation: telling you when to take a picture, when someone’s face is worth of immortalization, when you will be suitably charmed by the results.
As cameras get better and better at basic tasks, it becomes more and more difficult for professional photographers to distinguish themselves from a reasonably astute– and cheap– amateur. In the world of art, this incubated the developments of expressionism, cubism, and abstract art. If anyone (with a camera) could create a reasonably accurate image of a face, then what makes a work of art “valuable”? Something you can’t do with a camera: expressionism.