A post by Tom Coates about cameras communicating with each other reminded me of something I was thinking about last week in Tokyo.
After an all-nighter, a group of about a dozen of us crowded together to take “morning-after” photos (still too happy to realize how wrecked we all looked). We asked a young girl who’d just stumbled out of a club into the morning light to be our photographer. Someone handed her a camera, and then another, and another — she ended up with half a dozen cameras lined up on the sidewalk beside her.
Later that same day, as we all wandered through Yoyogi Park at dusk, we passed a large group of students posing for a group photo. The designated photographer had more than a dozen cameras lined up in a neat row beside her. There were film cameras, digicams, phone cams, and disposables.
It’s already possible to share photos easily with phone cams, but the quality of those shots is not yet great. Wireless needs to be built into higher-quality digicams so one camera can be used, and then the shot sent immediately to any similarly-equipped, surrounding digicams.
Far better to share shots immediately than to worry about parking yourself back home at a computer, trying to remember who wanted what shot.