The automatic camera

Not long ago I wrote about the Piccolette camera (above on the left). I'm still trying to get film for it and hope to have some in the new year. While waiting for some 1920s technology I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Autographer (above on the right). This is either an exciting development (excuse the pun, I'm going to try really hard not to write 'focus' now) in photography or the spawn of the devil and the end of civilisation as we know it.

The Aurographer was developed from an automatic camera that helps alzheimer sufferes by capturing key moments in their day, so they can review them later. This little machine is the consumer version. It senses movement, temperature, GPS data and light levels to make a pretty good guess at when it should take a picture. In thoery you clip it on your pocket, or wear it on a lanyard and then forget about it while it takes snapshos of your day. In practice, if you are me, you become horribly self-conscious that people will point at you and acuse you of taking sneaky pictures of them. Which you are.

What works very well with the Autographer is that it's wide angle lens captures things you might not even have thought to take a picture of, had you been toting your regular camera. I wore it for an evening when I was driving to a rehearsal studio and playing music. The results made a fascinating time lapse of dark roads, setting up equipment and bopping around to the music.

It's early days for this sort of wearable tech and I for one haven't yet managed to focus (damn!) on how I'll use it.