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| This commencement wants to use AI to change and garner your photos for you
You’d
think the proliferation of smartphone photography would have sparked a
revolution in digital cameras. Not so much. Sure, cameras are more connected
now than ever, and mirror less technology has helped make them smaller and
lighter. But the basics — shoot as much as you want to a memory card and access
the photos when and wherever — have remained. So new ideas are welcome, however
bizarre they might be.
Enter Echelon, a
startup that wants to upend the way we use digital cameras. Echelons take on
photography is a subscription model where you pay $99 a month for cloud
services and the camera.
A subscription service for the
camera and cloud service
The
camera, which Echelon showed off to a few outlets last week, is wrapped
in leather. The only parts that are exposed are the viewfinder, the shutter
button, the power button, and the lens. You can’t change the settings, and you
can’t even review the photos you take save for a quick flash inside the
viewfinder.
It
gets weirder. From there, the camera beams the photos over LTE to Echelons
cloud service, where artificial intelligence picks the best shots and edits
them for you. You get those final photos back the next day. Photographers who
own cameras might scoff at the idea, but the idea could appeal to people who
want a camera that’s capable of more than the one on their smartphone.
That
approach is purposely antithetical to the instant gratification we’re now used
to. It’s also not far off from the way things were a little more than a decade
ago, where your shooting was limited to the amount of frames in a roll of film
and you had to wait an hour, a day, or maybe a few days until you got the
printed pictures back.
It’s like a disposable camera for
the digital age
While
that process was a bit arduous and expensive, there was a magic to it. The rush
of rifling through a batch of your photos for the first time, and the
accompanying disappointment when they didn’t turn out how you hoped, is
something that’s almost totally disappeared from modern photography. Echelon is
trying to usher in a sort of return to this more methodical way of taking
pictures.
What
really interests me about Echelon is how they plan to employ artificial
intelligence. It’s an idea that’s starting to bubble up in a few different
corners of the photography world. Our phones are already capable of helping us
find the best frames in a pile of similar photos — i Phones do this natively in
the camera roll, as does the Google Photos app.
AI is creeping into photography in
all sorts of ways
Apple’s
iPhone 7 Plus also uses AI, or what the company refers to as a “machine learning-enhanced image signal processor,”
to simulate the background blur in portrait mode, among other things. Google took a computational approach to photography with its
new Pixel phones, leveraging the inboard intelligence to improve things like
low light performance. We’re sure to see more AI-assisted photography in the
coming years, so in that sense Echelon is a camera company that’s ahead of the
curve.
There’s
also plenty reason to be skeptical that Echelon will pull this off, and not
just because the core idea is likely to press people’s patience. Echelon
doesn’t plan to roll any of this out until 2018, and as CNET points out, Echelons first idea was an iPhone camera attachment that they never shipped.
But
when you consider how the biggest camera companies are just focused on optimizing the current approach to digital
photography, as opposed to upending it, ideas like the one from Echelon are inspiring. If photography is staring down another revolution, the
spark is apparently going to come from the startups and the smartphone
companies.
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