Thursday, March 11, 2010

A bright future?

This article has me a little worried. Basically it details how already there are computers which are able to compose original scores of music and another which is able to automatically write sports articles. The article then warns how this could impact the future of photography. Everybody is well aware of the prevalence of digitally altered images, well digitally created images are the next logical step it would seem.
I feel as though this would first impact commercial photography, where photography is used as a medium to portray an idea, emotion or some sort of product. There will still be areas where a person will have to be behind the camera in some way. Photo-journalism, weddings, sports to name a few. These images wouldn't have the same impact if they were 'thought-up' by a computer. I also think it would difficult to set up some sort of automatic capture for these fields.
This is something which is already in place in the field of photography I greatly enjoy: wildlife. Camera-traps are a bit of a grey area in this respect. All the major decisions are still made by a person: location, composition, etc. All that happens without the camera operator is the release of the shutter. This is done by critters triggering it, usually by some sort of light-trap (the animal breaks an infrared beam by stepping into it, the system acknowledges this by firing the camera). Wildlife photography is an area which I think is safe from being recreated digitally. It could be put under photo-journalism in this respect as you are documenting it as it happens. There have been several cases where some sort of 'setting-up' or manipulation of a wildlife image has caused a bit of an outcry. People want to see images of animals, behaving naturally in their natural environment, or at least as close as is possible.
So this new technology will affect large sections of photography, but not the craft as a whole.

No comments:

Post a Comment