Very interesting - very technical, but still very interesting

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Ongoing techincal developments and what the near future holds - Computational Photography.

Dave

[bill t.]

Well I can tell you what it all means.  No More Tripods!  Smart Sharpen on steroids.  Soon, but not quite yet.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Well I can tell you what it all means.  No More Tripods!  Smart Sharpen on steroids.  Soon, but not quite yet.

No but not that far away - also limitless DoF sensors at wide open apertures, now that could be very interesting indeed for landscape work...

Dave

[bill t.]

My next paper will describe how to completely reconstruct images of terrestrial locations from terrain elevation maps, satellite imagery, and Google Maps snapshots.  That will completely mitigate the need to actually travel to the location.

The paper after that will describe how self-driving, off-road vehicles with heuristic aesthetic software can be dispatched to automatically obtain attractive photographs based on vague descriptive input.  "Go out and get me some cool shots of that arch that glows red sometimes."

But yeah, have also read that future lens designs may revert to crudely crafted lenses make of old Coke bottles, attached to cameras with killer image reconstruction algorithms.  Before scoffing, it is worth noting that the lenses in our eyes, by which we evaluate the finest 1:1 nuances of D800e imagery, are essentially optical crap backed up by a stunning image processing system.

[Dave (Isle of Skye)]

Before scoffing, it is worth noting that the lenses in our eyes, by which we evaluate the finest 1:1 nuances of D800e imagery, are essentially optical crap backed up by a stunning image processing system.

Bill I totally agree and you are soooo right, all this desirable new technology stuff is always just around the next corner, which translates to, quite a long way around a very big corner and when it does finally arrive, it will only be available for those having very deep pockets and probably not work as well as all the hype said it would - but then again...

Dave

[Colorado David]

When I was the production manager of a medium sized regional video production company, our animation guy told me that soon we'd have processors that would be so fast there'd be no need for any significant rendering time for an animation.  It would simply happen in real time.  It hasn't happened yet.

[bill t.]

Except for video games and other graphics applications augmented with hardware graphics processors.  Systems like that would have seemed magical in the very recent past, but today every kid has one.

I have seen largish render farms that can produce smooth, fully-shaded, ray-traced, subsurface-scattered, photo-real, fully-hyphenated, theatrical-quality animation in real-time after only a few seconds of filling the pipeline.  But it will still be a few years before every kid has one.

But we are even today at a place where patient directors can control animated characters with almost the same ease as an somewhat intractable star actor.  Just as video taps transferred a lot of the cameraman's mojo to the director, fast graphics is now transferring a lot of animator's mojo to the director.  Proving once again that technology does not always serve the proletariat.

And there has been idle talk of distributing animated feature films by sending the algorithms and data directly to theaters, where they will be rendered as they are projected.

And next year computer graphics will completely do away with all forms of commercial photography.

I am planning on opening up a service where you can have your kids digitally scanned, then placed in fully blown simulations of Disneyland, Wally World, etc, where you can see them enjoying themselves in a variety of pre-scripted scenarios.  I except the "Mickey Mouse Hug" (tm) and "Snow White Smooch" (tm) sequences to be especially popular.  Still images will be available with or without Instagram (tm) processing in attractive 50's style photo albums.  All for a price considerably less than actually taking the trip.  Will launch the Cat scanning service about a year later.

I'm sure I've got things to do, must go.