Here’s quite possibly a novel thought. So many people I meet frequently think their point and shoot cameras aren’t especially good. Has it never dawned on these people that it is perhaps not their cameras, but their total lack of creativity that is to blame for most, if not all, of their below average pictures?
You see, most people buy the latest in modern compact camera technology in the completely misguided belief it will completely alleviate their need to learn about photography basics or even think about simple picture composition. For example the rather mind boggling “Face Detection function on Sony’s Cyber-shot digital still cameras rapidly locates faces in each shot and uses camera controls, including AF, AE and AWB, to optimize the settings for superb reproduction of facial areas”, while Sony’s equally dubious sounding “Smile Shutter function adds the ability to scan facial attributes, detect smiles and automatically control the shutter timing”.
Now maybe it’s just I who is seriously misguided here, but there are at best four not completely trivial points worth making regarding all of the above.
1. Surely compact point and shoot cameras, by their very nature and purpose in life, are already supposed to be fully capable of taking focused and well lit pictures of people?
2. Are camera manufacturers really suggesting their customers are too insanely stupid to recognise faces and smiles when they see them all by themselves?
3. Any point and shot camera in serious need of automatically overriding its own already automated controls, due to its owner’s complete and utter inability to recognise faces and smiles, should be permitted to electrically shock its owner until, either, its owner learns how to take semi-sensible pictures or gives up trying to do the former.
4. Anybody seriously requiring a camera with Face and Smile Detection functions shouldn’t be let within a hundred yards of a camera in the first place!
However, most importantly of all, and this might come as a complete and utter shock to some of those poor souls sitting in random marketing departments: 99.99 percent of people in need of a camera with Face and Smile Detection functions will most likely have never heard of seemingly bewildering and off-putting abbreviations such as AF, AE and AWB. Now there’s something to think about. Oh, and while I’m at it, treat your ears to the most sublime sound of Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and performed by “his” dazzling City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on EMI Classics!
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