Interesting!

[marco]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2092430307/arsenal-the-intelligent-camera-assistant

[Bjørn Rørslett]

From the blurb: 

The settings assistant is trained on thousands of great photos. It can determine the optimal settings for the scene you're shooting. Next it fine tunes those settings using 18 different environmental factors. The result is great settings for any shot. 

... advanced machine learning algorithms help you get the perfect shot every time.

And the irresistible highlight,

Avoids settings that produce weak images on your specific camera and lens

With such an assistant and AI-oriented hardware working for you, why bother about photography at all? Improvement on your own seems a futile exercise. Creativity cannot be created or governed by algorithms - it is a contradiction in term.

[marco]

point taken but i don't believe that it will lower my creatability in seeing amazing landscapes and actually take the photo that i have in mind, i've had many situations that there was so much to go through that i missed the potential of the surrounding i was in, maybe i don't have the time to spend as much as i would like to be able to take photo's but if this helps why not.
Just to see how fast it evolves these last few years especially in the digital world we live in that makes it interesting.

Marco.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

The creativity is in finding your own vision of the subject(s), and conveying this vision to an audience.  Not copying via an automated retrieval of stored recipes.

[Matthew Currie]

I'm not sure I want a program that sees what I don't.  I may miss many things but what I want in a photograph is to convey what I see and not what someone else thinks I ought to see.   That's what post cards are for.

I suppose I wouldn't mind a program that nagged me about missed twigs in the foreground, or blown highlights in a flower petal, but I suspect it's going to be more like rule of thirds and blurred water and shouldn't there be a log on the beach in the foreground just like the million other pictures of a lake and a mountain and a beach with a log in it.  Here, let me just tweak up the saturation and open up those shadows a little more.  I'd rather take my own bad pictures than someone else's good ones anyway,  which I'm sure many here and elsewhere would agree is a goal I'm quite capable of reaching. 

[Netr]

As I read the blurb, this is merely an expensive way to achieve what Nikon's Matrix metering already does. They are not promising to improve your composition, only your exposure.

[Akira]

I knew about this crowd-funding on dpreview.com and ignored it.

I think that the camera in my iPhone SE can do similar things pretty darn well, which makes photography far less challenging and far less interesting...

[CS]

Isn't Arsenal just a tool, like CamRanger, and other similar remote controls are tools? Isn't the AF-on button also a tool? Is it okay to use a wireless remote to trip the shutter, and perhaps do some focus stacking? Then not okay to use it to alter the exposure?

I can recall the loud cries when auto focus came along. It was going to kill creativity. If the shooter couldn't get his subject in focus in time to capture the shot then the shooter just wasn't good enough, and all other manner of derogatory claims toward AF photography.

My point is that creativity is the very absence of strict rules. New technology allows new tools which in turn allows new creativity. Back in the film days we didn't have cameras that had the controls found in a modern DSLR, yet making images was still called photography when using film. Todays digital cameras, coupled with software, can create images not possible on film. I'd bet the farm that Arsenal, and it's ilk, are not going to do any harm to photography, and in fact they may turn out to be a solid advancement in the art, much like AF, etc.

[marco]

Go out there and enjoy what you do and if this helps you in getting the photo you had in mind good for you!

[Bjørn Rørslett]

My response is to the naïve concept of what photography and photographic communication entail as witnessed by this crowd-funding project.

Tools are just that - tools.  Better tools by themselves don't make a "better" image. The photographer's vision might, however, make something new and refreshing, something that is not capable of being predicted by any AI system. The basic truth forgotten over and over again.

[David H. Hartman]

It appears to me that the device is just making it easier to set features already built into today's dSLR(s). It has some lookup table and suggests setting that the photographer that the photographer can use as is or modify. Maybe a kind of advanced set of "scene modes" as seen on entry level cameras. The promoter has withdrawn project for reasons not explained.

"These are not the droids you are looking for."

Dave 

[CS]

My response is to the naïve concept of what photography and photographic communication entail as witnessed by this crowd-funding project.

Tools are just that - tools.  Better tools by themselves don't make a "better" image. The photographer's vision might, however, make something new and refreshing, something that is not capable of being predicted by any AI system. The basic truth forgotten over and over again.

There's more to Arsenal than AI.

Better tools can help the photographer to make better images. Are the only worthy images those that are shot on full manual? No use of mode priorities such as aperture, speed, program?

Granted, it's the photographer that makes the image, but he's using tools to do it. How he uses them is irrelevant, and entirely up to him or her, IMO. In the end, all that counts is the image. YMMV 

[CS]

It appears to me that the device is just making it easier to set features already built into today's dSLR(s). It has some lookup table and suggests setting that the photographer that the photographer can use as is or modify. Maybe a kind of advanced set of "scene modes" as seen on entry level cameras. The promoter has withdrawn project for reasons not explained.

"These are not the droids you are looking for."

Dave

Not so, Arsenal is alive and well with over $2,000,000 in pledges from over 13,000 backers. The website shown at the start of this thread had an old, and thus incorrect, address, here is the correct address:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2092430307/arsenal-the-intelligent-camera-assistant-0

[Bjørn Rørslett]

"Better tools can help the photographer to make better images"

That is what all equipment makers, photo stores, and magazines all want us to believe is the truth. the truth is that only the photographer can make a photo great.  Technical perfection has no direct bearing on the quality of the outcome. Sad ? not really. Actually showing there is still hope.

[David H. Hartman]

Not so, Arsenal is alive and well with over $2,000,000 in pledges from over 13,000 backers. The website shown at the start of this thread had an old, and thus incorrect, address, here is the correct address:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2092430307/arsenal-the-intelligent-camera-assistant-0

Thank you for the correct link.

Dave