August 29, 2007
Photo Challenge
While I was taking pictures today—at the 2007 Annual Fall Convocation + Investiture Ceremony for president Barbara R. Snyder—Lev Gonick joked that he wanted to see the pictures up on my blog by the time the event was done.
Naturally that wasn't possible, I can't upload and shoot at the same time. In fact having taken over 400 photos I only have half of them up on Flickr now and will have to finish the rest on Thursday. (At which point I'll post the link.)
But the suggestion got me thinking; what tools would I have needed to make that possible? To that end I've got up with a list of requirements, most of which could probably be created by a team from our own campus.
- Bluetooth (or similar) enabled camera that could download images while I am still shooting new ones.
- Laptop, or preferably a smaller wireless device that could run a program to access the camera, grab the images, store them in some logical manner, then trigger another program to
- Pick out a small selection of the most interesting or aesthetically pleasing images, upload them to the blog server and include them in a new entry.
Some of this is already possible. The sticking points are:
- That it all has to happen while I am still taking additional pictures. Thus I would want to be able to push a button or start a program via a few simple commands then stick the device back in my pocket to be ignored while I keep taking pictures. (I could set parameters such as number of photos to blog, size, etc. in advance.) Conversely the process could be built into the camera which would access the wireless network and upload them all to be stored on Flickr (or the Blog server or somewhere else online) then trigger the rest of the process to happen on the server.
- Developing a program that could objectively choose the most interesting photos. Given that such choices are often subjective rather than objective I think this would be the most challenging part. But if we had an interdisciplinary team including programmers engineers and faculty/students from Cognitive Science and Art they might be able to create something that could get it right most of the time. It would certainly be interesting to see which shots a program would choose in comparison to which shots were most often chosen by people.
What do you think Lev? (And of course everyone else.)
Comments
Heidi: I've seen lots of photographers use a 1 Gig or 2 Gig card with their digital cameras. Pop them into their notebooks, run some pre-scripted scripts with Adobe Photoshop to clean them up, select the ones that you want to post and then use either 802.11 wi-fi or a mobile pcmcia wireless card to upload to the net (Flickr or ...).
Yes, that's pretty similar to what I do now. I have some actions set for certain lighting conditions so that I don't have to manually tweak every pic, and I can batch upload to Flickr. Of course on a day like yesterday—going from bright sun to Severance Hall, I'll need a few different actions.
My query was more about taking your joke literally—making the process happen in real time so that when I put down my camera at the end of the event, the photos would already be posted. In this case each photo would be sent into the system after being taken, while I would keep taking new pictures. Thus the pictures of faculty walking into Severance would have been processed and posted while I was still inside taking pictures of the ceremony.
In reality I don't know that there is an urgent need for this sort of funtionality—one could always swap out the cards and hand them off to someone else to upload—but I thought it was an interesting challenge.
I actually enjoy sorting my own photos, and choosing the takes that have the most interesting composition, lighting, and ultimately subject matter. I mean having automated things is pretty cool and makes life easy, but the more productive we get the more busy you actually become...