Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Digital Cameras Create Improved Reality. Cams Focus on Revised Reality

4:02 am | Yaroslav Lyssenko

Many people like to take pictures, but feel uncomfortable when some one is pointing the digital camera at them. Whether the person considers him or her self to be fat or thin, he/she does not want to leave such a history. Because of this fact we can see thousands of pictures with buildings and landscapes, and only a few portraits in one’s photo album. But it seem that things are about to change, as major manufactures implement into their digital cameras features that change reality.

Cnet News.com reports that several new Hewlett-Packard cameras include a feature that makes subjects look thinner, while another mode makes facial lines and pores virtually disappear. A “skin tone” feature on some Olympus models can give consumers a leisure-class tan. Other manufacturers offer modes to make the colors of the world richer as you capture them. Using these new in-camera tools, consumers can even crop out ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends, or put a virtual frame around new ones, thus changing the reality. With new tools, average people can create their own “pictures that lie” at the moment of capture, without any trace of the real image that was seen with the naked eye.

“People in the legal world are now concerned about whether photos can be accepted as evidence anymore, especially when you can alter the scene as you click the shutter. And in the old days, there was an original, now there is no original. Photography as a tool for providing evidence, or as proof, may not exist anymore,” said Peter Southwick, associate professor and director of the photojournalism program at Boston University.

With the digital camera market maturing, manufacturers are using new features to entice customers to upgrade their current digicams. Canon, Kodak, HP, Nikon and Olympus all offer features that increase saturation, bumping up the richness of color “seen” by the camera. The photographer clicks and a sunset forever becomes more brilliant than it appeared in real life. Homegrown vegetables become more luscious.

“The consumer products and all these changes in photography, to me, are going to cause an undermining of people’s ability to believe a photograph, which is the foundation of photojournalism. Now that it is at the consumer level and people are going to see this, I am not sure on a fundamental level that they are ever going to believe a photo when they see it,” adds Southwick.

• Cnet News.com: Digital Cameras Focus on Revised Reality.

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