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Just when you thought that digital photography couldn’t progress any further, some brainiacs at Stanford bust out some new technology.

Introducing the open-source camera, dubbed “Frankencamera“, a piece of technology where programmers can fine-tune a camera’s response to light and motion–outside of Photoshop.  Without getting too technical (algorithms, blah blah blah), this means that multiple images of a particular scene can be taken, processed to a particular exposure level and then recombined into a composite image. 

But wait, can’t you already do this on a computer?  Yeah, sure.  But in a camera… on-site?  That’s what Marc Levoy, a professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering  at Stanford University is looking to do with Frankencamera.

“Some cameras have software development kits that let you hook up a camera with a USB cable and tell it to set the exposure to this, the shutter speed to that, and take a picture, but that’s not what we’re talking about,” says Levoy. “What we’re talking about is, tell it what to do on the next microsecond  …  or fire the flash, focus a little differently and then fire the flash again — things you can’t program a commercial camera to do.”

He’s aiming to make this platform available to computational photography researchers first.  As for the rest of us normal consumers, we’ll have to wait a bit.  Essentially this technology leaves the photographer with the freedom to be completely experimental.  We’re only a couple of steps closer to making the perfect photograph in-camera.

 Hey nerds, want to know more?  See a little video of what we’re talking about?
Read the full article here:  http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august31/levoy-opensource-camera-090109.html