Perhaps a little on the technical side, but five trends suggested by writers at http://www.photosharingnuggets.com which will basically improve the quality of your photos. Some you may already have in your cameras, others maybe not.
In short, they will easily let you take MUCH better photographs.
These five trends are:
1. Noise Reduction
2. Geotagging (GPS)
3. High Dynamic Range (HDR)
4. Smarter Focusing
5. Photo Sharing.
We believe these trends will be much more important in the next few years than than just having more megapixels or lower priced cameras.
Let's talk about each of these trends, and more importantly, what this trend means for you.
NOISE REDUCTION
One of the biggest problems in photography is not having enough light to take great pictures, especially indoors or at night.
There are several ways to compensate -- for example, flash, a slower shutter speed, a wider aperture, or a higher ISO -- but each of these can create other problems.
There is now better specialized noise reduction software you can use to help solve this problem as well.
What this means for you: Over time, we predict more cameras and software will incorporate these features automatically, so it will become easier and easier to get great photos when there is poor light.
GEOTAGGING
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical information, like latitude and longitude coordinates, to a photograph. It's like having GPS in your camera.
Geotagging can be useful to help other people identify exactly where a photo was taken. For example, we've photographed many waterfalls in the Blue Ridge and Great Smokey mountains. It would be handy to know exactly where each photo was taken -- either for us, if we want to go back to a specific waterfall, or for others who also might be interested in photographing that waterfall.
Here's an example. "When we were in Southern California last October, we rented a boat and went up the coast a short distance. I imported this picture into Adobe Lightroom, and it automatically included the longitude and latitude (look at the GPS setting at bottom of this screen capture).
When you click on the arrow to the right of the GPS setting, it automatically opens Google Maps to that location. You can see how accurate it is -- it even shows where we were on the water! If you click on the map below, you can go to the live Google Maps page. Pretty cool..."
What this means for you: In the future, we predict many cameras will have geotagging built in. It will be fun to have the latitude and longitude coordinates (or even altitude information) of your photos, automatically linked with Google Maps.
HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE
One of the most difficult problems to solve in digital photography occurs when you have very different light in different parts of your photograph.
For example, a sunrise or sunset, a dark room that includes a window with bright light coming in (especially if there is a captivating view out the window), interesting bright clouds with a dark landscape, or any dark foreground framing a bright background.
The problem in these situations is that either you blow out the bright areas (they're all white), or you get no details in the dark areas (they're all black). Sometimes that's the effect. But if not, it's been almost impossible to get detail in both the light and dark areas.
You can now use specialized HDR software combining several similar photographs with different exposures. It works by combining three or more almost-identical images of the same scene: one with the dark areas properly exposed, another with the light areas properly exposed, and the third with the mid-tones properly exposed (which is probably the photo you'd normally take).
This software (for example, Photomatix, Bracketeer or a plug-in for Photoshop CS3), lets you combine the useful parts of each photo. It creates a composite to give you the best of all worlds (and even gives you some control of how to combine them).
What this means for you: Whereas this is fairly specialized today, in the future, we predict that cameras and editing software will have HDR built in so the camera can automatically take several photos and properly bracket your images to then automatically combine the best parts of each, giving you a compelling photograph of the sunrise, sunset, dark room, clouds, etc.
SMARTER FOCUSING
Cameras are getting a lot smarter about what to auto focus on. A great example available today is the face recognition capabilities in some of the Canon PowerShot cameras.
Face recognition means that the camera can detect a face in a scene, and then focuses on the face so that the face will be in focus (rather than the focus being on some other object you don't care about). Face recognition also guides the camera to optimize the the exposure of the face.
Since cameras often just focused on the nearest object, this can lead to a huge improvement in auto focusing. It also means that a person's eyes, rather than their nose (which is usually closer) will often be in focus, resulting in better photographs.
For example, if you want to take a picture of your daughter holding her new puppy, many cameras today will recognize her face and automatically ensure she's in perfect focus.
Further, as cameras become smarter and make better guesses about what you'd like to have in focus and what to blur, the quality of your pictures will improve.
For example, awhile back I took pictures of my niece and nephew throwing a frisbee (she's a champion frisbee player). I set my Canon XTi on "Sports" mode since they were moving fast and I'd never taken action shots before.
The camera did very well in terms of focusing on them and freezing the action. However, it selected settings that also had the background trees and dirt in very sharp focus. You can see what I mean in this picture of my niece about to catch the frisbee here.
As cameras get smarter, the focusing will likely automatically blur out this uninteresting background so it doesn't distract from the subject of the photograph -- in this case, my niece and nephew jumping to catch the frisbee.
What this means for you: Your photographs will improve -- we predict it will seem like the camera is "reading your mind" and taking the picture you WANT more often, rather than focusing on something distracting you didn't even notice in the shot.
PHOTO SHARING
As we've said many times, most people don't really know what to do with their photos after they take them. We're committed to helping people get their photos off their cameras and computers, out of their shoe boxes, and sharing them in new, exciting and fun ways.
There are already devices that let you upload your photos automatically from your camera's memory card to photo sharing sites over wi-fi. Many people have had good luck with the EyeFi card that can be added to your camera. This makes it very easy to start sharing your photos. But there are SO many more possibilities.
What this means for you: Over time, we predict there will be more -- and much easier -- ways to handle the technical aspects of photo sharing. And, the number of fun and exciting ways to share your photos (which is what this site is all about!) will continue to grow. Very exciting!
So let us know if you have seen any of these trends in action. A friend of mine has a compact digital camera which scans the scene and takes a photo when someone smiles. Pretty cool and yes we have tried frowning and smiling to see how good it really is - and it works!
KylieB
