Hey Everyone! This week I'm going to don my cape and turban and pull out my crystal ball and look into the future of photography.  What will camera technology be like in the future?  Will we all be cyborgs with cameras built into our heads?  Well, I don't think so, and you don't need a crystal ball to see into the future.  You just need to pull your phone out of your back pocket to see what the next technology will be for your camera.  This little camera that is disguised as a phone with the little tiny sensor that takes such good snapshots that are good enough to be blown up to a billboard-sized photo is the future.  Computational photography will be the future.  Computational photography is software that fixes or alters a photo in camera, like the portrait feature on newer phones that blur out the background like a f1.4 aperture lens would.  Like being able to put your camera in a mode "Nighttime" that allows you to handhold your camera at night and get great photos without blur. These things are being done now in phones and soon will be, if not already, in your camera by using super powerful on board computers.  So this brings up the question about larger sensor professional cameras.  Will they still be made?  If I can take the same quality photo with a small sensor camera that I can with a larger expensive $4,000 camera body and a $2,000 lens, why would I buy the more expensive?  I'm sure there will always be the people that have the money and the high-end professionals that will need these cameras, but what about the ordinary Joe like you and me?  I think that they will start buying  (every day Joes) the less-expensive ones.  Now if you're using smaller sensor-sized cameras and lenses made for these smaller cameras, the whole package will be smaller and more portable and great for the everyday photographer, travel photographer, and nature photographer.  There will be things that will be built into the cameras that we can't even think of yet.  And with cameras using computational photography, instead of upgrading hardware every couple of years, you could just do a software upgrade to make your camera as up to date as the guy buying a new camera.  I believe that we have about topped out the megapixel bubble, and more megapixel cameras just take up more storage on your computer and not necessarily better quality phot's.  We have 100 MP cameras now, and for most of us who take photography seriously, the only way we could tell the difference between it and a 24MP camera would be to Pixel Peep on a computer.  But to the naked eye not so much.  So far we've been talking about what our cameras will be able to do in camera, but what about software?

Post processing is very advanced now.  Just think about what it will be able to do in the future.  The newest trend right now is AI (artificial intelligence), that we can enhance the photographs, shadows, contrast, and many more items by just sliding a slider. There are sky enhancers, foliage enhancers, and sky replacements.  All of these can be done in Photoshop, but newer programs are going to make these easier to do without having to be a Photoshop skilled editor.  I can only see AI getting better, and along with the computational photography, I only see stunning, eye popping photographs coming in the future.

Photographers Eye Now, did I come up with this all by myself?  No, not really.  I listen to a lot of podcasts on photography.  One of them is the "Future of Photography."  The one that gave me the idea of this blog is "The Digital Story." The Digital Story Podcast #725  Click on this link to listen to the podcast by Derrick Story that gave me this idea.  I think that the future of photography is bright, and I can't wait, although I will be an old timer and will probably stick to what works for me. So until next time, keep shooting and get outside!