Hello. So I'm here to talk about cameras and kind of where they're going in the future
and I guess where they're taking us as well. Quick two second background on me. My name
is Ron Brinkman. I've worked on a bunch of movies in the past doing visual effects, animation,
that sort of stuff. Wrote a book about similar kind of things which included a lot about
cameras and photography. I worked at Apple for a while. I worked on their photography
organization tool called Aperture. And pretty much every week I can be found on the This
Week in Photo podcast where I talk about a lot of the same stuff I'm going to be talking
about here tonight. I'm not a professional photographer but I did once sell some photos
to Playboy magazine. But if I told you anything more about that story it would get a lot less
interesting so I won't go into details. So before I go any further how many people brought
a camera with them to the show here tonight? Just raise your hand. And actually those of
you that didn't raise your hand let me ask again how many people brought a camera to
the show tonight? I thought so. Point being of course that we tend to think of cameras
historically as these big monstrous devices and obviously they've gotten smaller, a lot
smaller and this trend of course is going to continue. Here's a little camera that's
the size of the head of a pen and even beyond that here's one that's etched into basically
into a circuit board. And what I see with cameras is kind of what we saw with circuitry
as well. You're probably all familiar with Moore's Law or this sense that technology
in terms of transistors and microprocessors has been really growing at this ridiculous
sort of exponential rate for the past 40 years or so. And I think if you had said this to
somebody 40 years ago that they were going to get this crazy increase in technology and
processor power they probably would have pictured a really, really kick-ass calculator. They
probably would not have pictured your iPads or your iPhones or even the CPUs that are
in your car. The modern car these days has about 300 different microprocessors in it.
And so we're going to see the same thing with cameras. I think we're starting to see that
already obviously, but you know it's as they get cheaper, most importantly, they get smaller
and they get more powerful but they get cheaper, I think you're going to start to see them
really everywhere in the same way you see microprocessors everywhere now.
So real quick, a couple things in the short term, things that are going to change the
way that we as photographers do photography, things like even exposure, you may have heard
of this high dynamic range idea where we've got a real problem still with cameras can't
always capture the full range of brightness in a scene so you either get well-exposed
skies but the foreground doesn't riot or you try to do the other thing. There's tools
for letting you do this, put this together. The interesting thing is that it tends to
now involve not so much you take a picture and it's right, but that you come back and
you sit on your computer and you work on it a little while and then you get the picture
that you want. And that's the trend that I really see a lot happening is that this act
of photography is going to move to being something you do in front of the computer after the
fact. Even things like focus, you know, if you have a scene like this and you get back
home and you decide, you know what, I didn't really want to focus in the foreground because
these aren't the droids you're looking for. There's a new camera coming out, actually
was just announced today that allows you to after the fact decide, okay, maybe I'm going
to focus in the back of this scene and you sit in front of your computer, press your
button and it will choose to refocus there. This camera was literally announced about
five hours ago, so this is cutting-edge stuff, people. I'm on top of it for you. And it's
in the $400 price point or something, so it's really going to be different and you can imagine,
you don't have to think about focusing anymore. Even what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive
moment, which is that sense of when do you pull the trigger, right? When do you press
the shutter? That's a skill, it's a huge skill for figuring out when to do the right thing.
But now with cameras like this, this is a phantom camera that can shoot at about a million
frames a second. And it's awesome for taking videos of dudes wiping out on skateboards,
obviously, which is pretty cool. But the point being, once you've got a camera that can shoot
really fast and really high quality, then you can kind of just pick out your favorite
photo after the fact. So again, you come back home and you pick out the right one. Nikon
also just announced a camera within the last few weeks that's shipping within the next
couple months that does exactly this. You put the camera up to your face and it's already
starting to take photos. When you press the shutter, it takes a short burst and then again
you figure it out after the fact. And even, and this one's really starting to get pretty
rocket science, your viewpoint, where you're standing when you take your photo, you think
that that's something that you kind of have to decide when you're in the scene. But take
something like this. Here's a very exciting brick wall with a door in it. Take a couple
of shots from different angles and there's a service called Photo Fly where you can upload
these multiple shots and it gives you back this, a 3D model of the scene. So suddenly
you don't have to get it right. You just take a few photos of it and then come back later
and say, I like that better. And there's huge ramifications of this in a lot of different
areas and we'll talk about some of them. But just this basic concept that I can do that,
that I can just take a lot of photos and then create the scene later. News organizations
are already sending people out, local people out to take photos because cameras are so
good that they know they can get local guys to do it. But you can imagine they would send
people out and then just have all these photos come back. They build one of these models
and the art director can decide where he's going to put the camera. And I guess the big
takeaway from this is this idea that the traditional model of a single big camera is really kind
of maybe going to go away and having multiple smaller cameras, either different people carrying
them or even something like this on the back of your iPhone, you may see relatively soon,
something like that. The sensors are cheaper and you can actually get higher quality out
of it. I guess the point I'm making is that this idea of taking a picture is really going
to change to being one of when you're on location, you're capturing the scene. And then you go
back and you make the picture after the fact. But this idea of capturing a scene is really
another way of saying you're gathering information. And that's where I see cameras going beyond
just being a thing for taking a picture. It's really a tool for gathering all sorts of information.
There's a lot of sort of dangerous connotations to this. We'll talk about some of them. But
think about just for your own benefit, first of all, sort of self-surveillance. There's
this idea, this concept called life logging, where you just try to record everything that's
going on in your life. There's a dude at Microsoft who's been wearing this thing around for the
last 10 years taking photos of everything he does, every conversation he has, everything.
And he's got it. And God knows how you've managed to wade through any of that. And you
might ask, why the hell would I want to do it? But you can start to see a lot of places
where it sort of acts like your external memory. It's something where you can remember the
conversation you had a few days ago or the argument you had a few days ago when somebody
made a point. And I didn't say that, but I can prove you did. Or even a business negotiation,
a handshake agreement, or if nothing else, where the hell did I leave my car keys last
night? These are not exactly fashion-stylish sort of things just yet. But then again, neither
are these. And you see a lot of people doing that. And in fact, you can buy yourself a
camera Bluetooth headset already on Amazon if you're so inclined. I'm not, but as it
gets to be more like this, they get smaller, you can put them into a pair of regular eyeglasses,
sunglasses. Here's a little kit that can replace a button on your shirt. But not just replace
the button on your shirt. Here's a piece of fabric that they've developed that actually
has an embedded camera. So you can weave a shirt out of cameras, and it would be your
shirt camera. Tons of medical issues. This is the pill cam. This is real. This is a little
pill that you swallow. It's got a camera in the front as well as some LEDs, and it makes
this way through your digestive system, and it sends back plenty of photos along the way.
It's got a little wireless transmitter, so you can get a nice view of your internals
there. And of course, you know, it seems to me like then you could put that through that
same technology we saw with the brick wall, recreate a full 3D representation of the inside
of your intestines, and then there's only a step from there to set up a first person
shooter game that's set inside of that environment. Ew. Or what about backup cameras? These are
obviously very common, but why just in the back of the car? You know, why not have them
all the way around so I can see in all directions whenever I'm driving and know who's where.
And then if you think about it, why just limit it to while I'm driving? Why not just have
it running all the time? Because there may be situations where you want to know what's
going on. And then obviously, probably the biggest issue with all these cameras getting
small is just tremendous privacy implications. You know, if you've got a camera that can
hide in literally a pack of gum or in a pen, these are all real, in your tie if you're
really styling. I think for me, the one that I find sort of most interesting is this. This
is a little key chain fob. It shoots high resolution stills, high definition video.
And you know, you can totally imagine if somebody sat down for a conversation with you and set
their keys on the table next to you, you wouldn't think twice about it. But that could be a
camera. And this is not super secret spy stuff that only the elite James Bond's get to have.
This is on Amazon, $18. Pretty much getting to the point where you kind of can't really
tell, you know, where's, can you trust the bugs in your living room or not. And I don't
know how much of a concern this is or isn't with people. You know, it's, for me, I don't
know if I care that much if people see me doing things, but celebrities will always
figure out a way to find themselves naked on camera and get leaked to the internet. I
think I saw the whole meme that spun out of this where people did their dog. And then
Chewbacca and Chuck Norris. But you might say, all right, I'm not dumb enough to let
pictures of me get out on the internet somewhere. But here's a shot. This is taken from the
balcony of my ex-girlfriend's apartment building. And I shot it with an iPhone. And the iPhone
has a nice little GPS chip in it that gives you all those driving directions. And anytime
you take a photo with an iPhone, it gets embedded in that, the GPS data gets embedded
in there. You maybe upload it to some website like Facebook. Somebody else downloads it
and hey, look, this is exactly where the photo was taken. There's a satellite view. And that's
the balcony I was standing on when I took the shot. In a situation like this, maybe
not a big deal, it's a high security building. But, you know, if this was my mother taking
a shot of the results of the latest bank heist that she did or something in the living room,
you might be more concerned about it. Face recognition is another huge technology becoming
very mature. Vegas is using it to identify high rollers as well as every license plate
that comes in. You can only imagine the military loving to have a little drone that recognizes
somebody who can pick them out of a crowd. And this is, again, not just government kind
of stuff that's doing it. There's an iPhone app that's been developed. Face recognition
is built into the latest version of the Apple operating system for the phones. They could
cross-reference crowds, look back through Facebook pictures, identify people. And they
took that through some dating websites where people, I think, have a reasonable expectation
of privacy. And they were able to identify something like 20% of the people there and
associate them with their dating profiles. So be aware. There's even what they call gate
recognition, G-A-I-T, the way you walk. That's an identifying feature. You can take video
of somebody and identify who they are just by the way they walk. And even pattern matching
for places is starting to happen. Supervision, if you want to call it. We're all familiar
with night vision kind of stuff. But here's a device that can see through concrete walls.
Which is kind of cool. I don't know how many people traveled a few years back during the
SARS epidemic, but they had the infrared cameras out. And that was to tell if anybody was walking
through with abnormally high body temperature. But it turns out that when you tell a lie,
you tend to flush. And your body temperature of your face goes up. So you can use some
of these things as lie detectors as well. And even the heat from your finger when you
type in your pin number at your ATM. Infrared cameras, if you walk up just a little bit
later you still get that. Pretty easy to guess maybe what this guy's pin number is. So are
we fucked? This is what one CEO said. And to an extent, yeah, we are. But I kind of
think it's sort of changing a little bit. The notion of privacy is changing. Yeah, there's
going to be our computers and our cameras are going to be watching us. And maybe the
evil eye of Sauron. But at some level I think it's an arms race. Technology for monitoring
people is going to get better. But also our technology for kind of fighting against that
kind of thing. So here's a device that can detect cameras in a room. And the next generation
of this is even cooler because they mounted a freaking laser beam on top of it. A high
powered laser beam that identifies where the cameras are and shoots the laser back and
shatters the lens. So I need one of these. And face recognition is certainly not at 100%
yet. Has not worked 100% to identify the rioters. There's a lot of reasons for that. You can
obscure your face. A lot of them did. It's going to be a little bit more than maybe putting
on a pair of glasses to hide your identity. But there's a researcher that's sort of published
a guide for facial makeup that is specifically designed to defeat this face recognition technology.
You can only imagine what sort of fashion statement that's going to be in the near future.
And even that the gate recognition, the way you walk, I'm assuming there's going to be
some way that we're going to come up with to defeat that as well. And finally I guess
the point is it goes both ways. If the government is going to surveil us, you kind of feel
like we have the obligation and the right to monitor our own world as well. I'm not
necessarily advocating that we take camera mounted cockroaches, which exist, and send
them into politicians homes, but maybe not a bad idea. And particularly as we enter the
silly season of politics here, some of that the lie detection technology where if you
film somebody in infrared or there's some micro expression analysis that can also tell
when people are lying, it'd be nice to know if maybe we're recording these politicians
and then we do some analysis, even if it's not perfect yet, it'll get better and better.
And I can identify when they were lying. Then again it is politicians, so it's kind
of a moot point I guess. And then the final sort of really scary thing is that there really
is an intention or an attempt to try and prevent people from keeping track of what the police
are doing. And this is probably the most frightening thing that I'm seeing is that we're seeing
a lot of these police officers not wanting to be taped. And I think it should be our
rights to be able to do that. So if there's any takeaway of this, hopefully everybody
can kind of be aware of that particular scenario. In the meantime, I guess the other thing that
I'm really waiting for is about time that some of these refrigerator manufacturers start
putting cameras inside of them so we can figure out when it's time to buy beer. Thanks, everybody.
