My Camera's Last Remaining Advantage is a $1.99 Wrist Strap

Two years ago, I predicted that smartphones would replace dedicated cameras for the majority of consumers. I also had the smug notion that caring about aperture and exposure values would forever leave me with a "proper" camera. All it took was a trip to a damp Northern European island to show how wrong I was.

Lighting conditions in Scotland are challenging at best. You are usually dealing with a cloudy sky that gives you the choice of overexposed light grey overhead or an underexposed shadow of your subject matter. High Dynamic Range photography takes multiple exposures and composites them together with a bilateral filter to make the local gradients appear natural, enabling all the detail at each exposure to stand out. Though I had a choice of cameras for most subject matters, time after time I kept reaching for my phone's HDR camera over my high-end point-and-shoot.

HDR, 5MP phonecam	Single-exposure, 10MP PowerShot
Sky has blue, foreground a bit neon but properly exposed	Sky overexposed, foreground good

The trend will likely continue. The next versions of my camera (the Canon S95-110) have an in-camera HDR feature, but the camera's weak processor necessitates less-advanced image matching that creates ghosting and other artifacts. The matching and quality of the on-board image processing from my year-old smartphone is strong enough to handle moving objects in the foreground and whatever else I throw at it. The processing gap will only grow over time as camera manufacturers have a hard time justifying 8-core processors and other beasts. The science of optics has been stable for the last hundred years or so, but we're just beginning to experiment with superresolution, adaptive lighting control, and light field rendering. The action is in processing, not optics.

At this point, the most notable advantage that my point-and-shoot has over my phone is a wrist strap; I feel more comfortable dangling my well-secured camera over a canyon edge than my smooth, featureless slab of a phone. Build a retractable iPod Touch-style "loop" into my next phone and I may not bother bringing a dedicated camera along on my next vacation.

One Corner of the CE Space That Hasn't Converged Yet

My kayaking loadout now includes three distinct pieces of waterproof electronic gear. These provide me with communications, image capture, and navigation. The same functions (and more) are all provided by my smartphone in one handy package, but it doesn't perform nearly as well under salt water immersion. For now, I'll stuff a bunch of dedicated devices into my PFD. So many other bits of electronic ephemera have already vanished into our phones that using 3 specialized devices feels wierd.

	+		+		<
waterproof VHF radio		waterproof camera		waterproof GPS		non-waterproof phone

Check out this guy, for example. Yes, he's an absurdist parody. Consider, however, that today our MONDO 2000 friend could fold his money, video cam, minidisc, scanner, display, microphone, video players, cell phone, voice changer, powerbook, pager, gps, and still camera into a low-end smartphone. And by the way, he wouldn't need the now-defunct wood-pulp magazines either.

One waterproof phone may replace all that single-purpose gear someday so I'll look less like a waterproof version of the 1995 cyberdude. Anyone want to make a case for a phone with a built-in stun gun?

The 2.1285e+10 pixels of 2011 (so far)

How do you visualize an entire year of photography in a single graphic? The following is a geeky art project I indulged myself in. It measures every pixel I have taken so far this year, showing the prevalent hues and volume of photos throughout the year. Each bar represents a week of images - there would be 52 if the year were over. The length of the bar represents the number of pixels of photography done in that week. The colors in the bar show the hues captured during that week.

The quantity trends are pretty obvious. The first bump in January is indoor shots from my signature annual party. I took relatively few photos in the spring when I was locked in the thesis cave. Photo quantity grew in the summer as I embarked on weekly kayaking and hiking trips. Peak pixel was September as I took a week to bike through France, capturing hundreds of images along the way.

Hue trends are also present. Winter times have a lot of brown and white. Green appears more as summer approaches. I might be fooling myself but I think I can even see autumn foliage. You might notice the appearance of a red kayak and a red backpack if you look carefully. I had hoped that my brilliant yellow kayak would show up in the summer photos, but the boat's colors get spread out among too many different hues to be noticeable.

How did I make this? MATLAB of course!

1. Sort a 512-color RGB colormap with RGB2NTSC
2. Load an image with IMREAD
3. Reduce JPEG's truecolor space down to a tractable 512 colorspace with RGB2IND
4. Bin all pixels into groups with IMHIST
5. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sum all photo histograms, binned by date.

The trickiest part was figuring out how to sort the 3-dimensional RGB color space into a pleasing 1-d continuum. It turns out that I'm not the first to have this problem; the folks over at Visualmotive already investigated this and I agree with their preference for the YIQ colorspace.

In the histogram above, you can see blue peaks for the sky, green for the trees, and orange for the hiker's shirt. Black is prevalent since shadows are dark and some objects (the dog, the shirt) are also black. The most heuristically "wrong" thing about the 512-color reduction is that purple/magenta hues show up more often than you'd expect. There's a bit of lilac in the sky, and the same color often also shows up in wood and stone.

This was a fun project. I like using computation to come up with new ways to understand the world.

Disrupting Photons

Technology-watchers have been predicting that cell phone cameras will replace single-function cameras since the first featurephones were released. The serious photographers who write on the subject have now embraced the digital SLR over chemical film, but still laugh at the idea that the tiny optics of a phonecam could ever subsume a dedicated device. Today, I saw evidence that the laughing is over and that phone manufacturers have moved on to the next phase in the tech transfer attitude chain. ("first they mock you, then they fight you, then you win")

There is a billboard just outside Logan airport which says "If it has a ringtone, it's not a camera." This is obviously a defensive move from a threatened incumbent. I am writing this from MIT's Killian Court where hundreds of tourists pour forth from buses each day to photograph each other in front of the great dome. An informal survey shows that about half are using cellphone cameras. Personally, I take more pictures with my blurry iPhone 3GS camera than with my fancy Canon s90 or my rugged Pentax w80. The iPhone 4's camera is even better and will probably represent even more of my picture-taking when I purchase its successor. The idea of a cell camera replacing a single-purpose device is already here for the majority of consumers and is just around the corner for everybody but the most serious artiste.

My tech strategy classes last semester covered many such turning points. We have seen the signs and they are all here. I am imagining the New England lake-ice industry with a billboard in 1920 saying "If it came from a machine, it isn't ice." Sailboat makers could claim "If it has propellers, it isn't a ship." Gas lighting manufacturers might try, "If there is no flame, there is no illumination." This campaign comes off just as desperate, and just as doomed.