Taking Advantage Of Photo Opps When You Are Not Behind The Lens

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Experts say, “If no one is around to hear the tree fall, then it didn’t make a sound. The definition of sound is “something that you hear.”

You can ask the same thing about photography. If a photo opp presents itself, and a photographer is not around to shoot it, does that mean it never happened?

OMG Life, a British tech firm, is addressing that question with a new groundbreaking camera that will never allow the perfect picture to be missed again. The new automatic camera, called the Autographer, is going to “change the way we think about photography.” It takes the photographer out of the process.

I first heard about this game changer a few months ago when an English friend of mine showed me pictures he took at a party he attended. I asked him who took the pictures because there was something special about what was captured. I was looking at free-spirited, candid shots that I just felt my friend had no ability to take. I didn’t tell him that but he could sense it from me. I am not saying that my friend is not a good photographer, but his photos are always very staged. The photos before me were a slice of life that only a voyeur or a risk-taker would snap. They were very interesting and made me feel that these kind of candids were a new twist to his usual photo stories.

He then told me about the Autographer and I just had to share it with you. The camera is a hands-free, digital unit that automatically takes thousands of photographs a day and stores them for review on a smartphone app. The software was developed by Microsoft. You can hang the camera on a wall but it was really designed to be worn constantly. The camera repeatedly takes pictures as the owner/user goes through his or her daily life.

Here is what the company says about Autographer.

“Housed in a relatively small, discreet black case, the camera is designed to be worn on a necklace lanyard, or on the strap of a bag. It has five on-board sensors to detect changes in temperature, light, motion, direction and color, and uses those cues to take shots with its wide-angle lens. The camera has a 136-degree field of view, meaning it can capture more of a scene than a typical camera phone. It also features 8GB of memory and takes 5-megapixel images, allowing it to store many days’ worth of pictures. Thanks to a Bluetooth chip on board the device can interact with your smartphone via a bespoke app, letting users manage their photos, export video files and GIFs and delete specific images if an unwitting subject objects.”

The Autographer is being formally debuted in the UK next month. It will cost around $300. It should arrive in the United States a few weeks or months later depending on OMG distribution deals.

The big question for Americans will be if they want to be in the company of someone wearing the Autographer camera that is forever shooting? It could present a new “take” on the world.

(Eliot just previewed my blog post. He said “no one will buy this camera. No one wants to go through thousands of photographs.” I couldn’t disagree with him more. He is a photographer that likes to carefully examine each photo. Not me. I can flip through hundreds, thousands of photos and pick something that appeals to me pretty quickly. I am looking for something different. He is looking for something perfect).

3 thoughts on “Taking Advantage Of Photo Opps When You Are Not Behind The Lens

  1. I just heard a story on this very same camera on the radio this morning, and was so intrigued! What a fun camera to have at a wedding or birthday party or special event. It could even change sports photography (and call shots better than umpires!). It does seem that it could be potentially invasive of people’s though.

  2. I’m with Eliot on this one. There have been other attempts for a auto cameea like that of OMG Life. Sony had a digicam mounted on a turntable that could be programmed to shoot a photo every so many seconds and would continue until the memory card was full. It was totally geared towards the wedding, birthday party and other family and other social events. And it bombed. If you think about the disposable cameras that are still being left on the tables at a wedding reception, the high majority of the photos taken are still somewhat staged but would have never been taken by the professional photographer(s) who were shooting the wedding. Camera phones like the latest in the new iPhone 5 will increase the number of great, casual photos that catch the action at these type of get togethers and events. Just my 2 cents worth of input.

  3. Big Brother is here, but we didn’t need this camera to bring it. You’re pretty much already getting photographed all the time, one way or another. Personally, I’d hate to have my photography upstaged by a key fob.

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