[mithrandir]

New Scientist Magazine has an interesting article on new directions for digital photography:

The future of photography - tech - 16 September 2008 - New Scientist Tech

[chrisman]

A fascinating article. I especially liked the One Pixel Camera - I suppose from a marketing point-of-view it will be "Our Pixel is Bigger Than Their Pixel"

I agree, fascinating, but will it still be photography? I think imaging would be more of an appropriate term. It seems to me that a lot of skill and technique will be lost or it will evolve with the technology and be, like the cameras, different.
What happens when that one pixel gets hot?

[mithrandir]

I like the low light possibilities that the process described for preventing blur of moving subjects would provide in a club setting.

[cromagnonrand]

Gee... you mean I can make everyone pretty with the touch of a button. I would rather take a less doctored photo, and press a button and have everyone changed into competent drivers.

[virgilr]

I've read through the article, and as some of this is fascinating, most of these advancements are based on one specific aspect of imaging, as was rightly stated before.

The near future- well, I'm hoping we start to see affordable HDR displays! We are just playing with the idea at this point- our display devices devices can only handle about 1/4th of the information in an HDR image, and we just extrapolate that information to best match the range of what can be seen on our display devices when we output an HDR image to an 8 bit (or 12 or 16 bit) image.

If we could actually see all the information even in a 12 bit RAW file, I think we'd all be impressed! Of course we won't see that same level of dynamic range in a printed image- print will always be restricted by the chemical processes themselves- but I think this is such an interesting path to imaging, and viewing images.

Imagine an HDR sensor capable of capturing the dynamic range of a 32 bit image: then being able to display that image on a display that would actually be able to reproduce it. Exposure issues? Well, of course it would require a re-think of exposure, but light is light, we're just limited in the thinking of photography to handle a fairly narrow bandwidth of dynamic range, starting back with how chemicals would react when exposed to light to our modern digital sensors. We'd actually be able to see all the shadow detail and highlight detail in our images, without having to compromise an image into an 8 bit world!

Just my two bits on the future of imaging.