Professional photography for the masses
I doubled as guest and photographer at my brother-in-law's wedding last weekend. I was using my trusty Canon Digital Ixus 400, armed with two 256MB memory cards, two batteries and the battery charger. I chose to shoot at 1600x1200 pixel resolution, with low JPEG compression. At those setting I had room for something like 500 images, and I ended up shooting around 450 images all during the event.
Which brings me to my main point. Digital cameras have made it possible for anyone to shoot like a professional photographer would, taking hundreds of images and selecting the best ones afterwards. What I mean by making it possible is of course the cost issue, or rather the removal thereof. Digital photographies cost next to nothing until they are printed, and you only have to print the best ones. Good stuff.
Is that a scanner in your palm?
There's a story on Slashdot featuring technology "that lets people use their cellular phones with cameras as scanners. It says all you have to do is move your phone over the surface of the piece of paper while recording a movie, and the technology (some sort of software I presume) will construct a high resolution image from the individual frames of the video." OK, I quoted a whole lot back there, but this kind of technology is really interesting. The story comments note several related projects, like ALE and Video Orbits. I find it very cool that technology is coming to the point where one can compensate for sub-optimal quality using larger quantities of source material combined with sofisticated processing. This is actually rather close to how the human brain is thought to make an image, because the resolution of the eye really isn't that great. Or so it is claimed in some of the cognitive science textbooks I've read.