Just for a moment, imagine a camera that can auto-correct not only the exposure, but what the perfect image should actually look like.
Imagine a camera that instantly evaluates, second guesses, and corrects what you thought would be a great picture of the family dog, your prize cabbage, or the new baby. We already have cameras that come close to making perfect images in the DSLR range in terms of exposure, and the smart phone market isn't far behind. In the future, we'll have cameras that can finish the job. Not only will cameras fix the exposure for us, they will suggest the best compositional choices, and send the final image wirelessy to your email box.
We live in a world of increasing tele-optic intelligences -- due in large part to unprecendented computational development and design. We "see," but our cameras will "see" even better. In the future, the camera's sensors will tell you more about the picture you are trying to make than you could possibly consider.
In the future, when you raise your camera to compose a picture a sensor will calculate compositional choices based on well-established design principles such as the rule of thirds, repetition of form, use of color, depth of field, and that sort of thing. The camera will tell you when there is a tree coming out of someone's head or that the raccoon-like shadows around your subject's eyes need attention.
Apple and Google are hard at work on Artifical Intelligent goggles and cars that can "see" for themselves. Samsung and Nissan have just announced they'll be introducing a car in 2015 with an "all-around view" camera that will allow the car to park itself.
In the future, cameras will tell us that the horizon is crooked or that someone's face isn't visible in a group shot. Maybe the camera will be able to speak to us with suggestions through a headset like a producer speaks to a camera operator on a TV set or like the voice of a GPS device "directing" us to our destination. "Reculating" -- move two feet to the nortwest, raise the viewer 4 degrees vertically, move closer "x" number of inches.
We already have cameras that won't release the shutter until all eyes are open. How about those cameras that can make your subject look 10 pounds thinner?
In the future, our ability to record the world faithfully with our camera will be less magical and based more upon a finite set of well-defined instructions for calculating not only the proper exposure but also the best composition.
In the future our pictures will be Ansel Adams perfect.
Photography is on the edge of incredible advances -- those that are sure to be less about the photographer's skill and more about how the camera can be programmed to "see" for us. What we are looking at here is a camera that can "park" itself.
Ultimately, the limits of what we see seem only hindered by the things we can't imagine.
