Policarpo Baquera’s “The Camera, Transformed by Machine Vision”

The implementation of machine learning to capturing processes has opened a new field of self-driven cameras able to shot, edit, and compose photographs without our assistance. Although it can seem new, we, as ‘users’ either in photography or any other skillful task, have been bestowing autonomy to all of our tools and devices since the industrial revolution. That first concession is the ‘auto’ mode of our cameras that analyzes the exposure of the image to define specific camera settings. Cameras have become more intelligent over the years to produce more realistic, contrasted, and saturated images able to mimic our vision. Still, in that scenario, the willingness to shot and decide what is kept inside or outside the frame is ours, and that is why photography as a career still exists. In all this kind of photos, the authorship of the revealed product lies in the user. But as cameras evolved as autonomous devices, the responsibility for the style and content of the photo, and eventually, even the authorship could be transferred to the creator of the software and hardware of the camera. Perhaps, the future photographers would be curators of contextual frames and style books used eventually to generate countless exhibitions with pictures taken by communities of users equipped with intelligent cameras.