Tag: cameras

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The Orwellian Camera

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.

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The World is Watching You

A new CMOS digital camera image sensor now costs only about five bucks to produce. This is the component of electronic products that translates an image into digital I/O for a computer.

There a lot of websites devoted to people who put these little cams into their apartments or bedrooms and invite you to watch them live their lives. But with these camera’s getting so cheap, we are going to see them everywhere.

You are going to see shoe-cams, so you can record where you walked. Your kids will wear hat-cams while playing baseball. You will have a car cam, so your wife can see if you’re sticking to the speed limit. There is going to be a camera in every phone-booth, so people can try to figure out what you were doing in a phone booth when you have a cell phone. There will be cameras in your lunch box, to see if you really eat your tuna salad sandwich, and in your office, so your boss can see if you’re in.