Ideas for new pentax models..

Hi all,

having over 1100 photos to go through and process (not all, thankfully, but a fair few) this week, following my sojourn to the Lake District, I've decided that there is one thing missing from my DL, and as far as I know all DSLRs. That is the ability for the camera to know whether I'm shooting portrait or landscape. I use Ulead (v8.0) to download my images from the card, as it came with a P&S camera, and I can just run through and select the ones for rotation as a batch job. It chugs a bit but does the job eventually.

Wouldn't it be so much easier if there were some device inside the camera that could check the orientation, and then tell the primary software to produce it accordingly. Obviously the good old mercury switch is going to be illegal by now, but I'm sure there must be someway of doing it without our beloved leaders in Brussels getting their knickers in a twist, and it would save so much time, especially for those of you that do pro studio work, where many shots are portrait, and time is money.

Just a thought. Any other ideas come to mind as you work?

Cheers

Liam

Liam,
The Canon DSLRs have this. They just set an EXIF flag and the software (generally) does the rest.
In Capture One it's not difficult - Ctrl-R or Shift-Ctrl-R and works on single images as well as multiple selected images. Because it's so easy, it's never really bothered me that much
Matt

if you shake your canons you can hear a little rattle.
that would be a ballbearing that sits inside a little geo-dome-like buble full of electrical contacts. rotate the camera and the little ball rolls around makeing a closed circiut where ever it lands.
my two requests would be this:
my canons have a web enables function (not documented in any of thier manuals) that allows my apache webserver (and bonjour network) to talk with the camera and operate it remotely from within my web browser...
a wi-fi adaptor.

(my other wish would be a user adjusteable built in variable nd filter over the sensor. but nobodies invented that one yet)

I fancy a bi-focul viewfinder - one that shows a wide angle view then when the shutter is half pressed gives the actual view through the lens. It would make plane and bird spotting a lot easier. By the time I have spotted the subject, adjusted the zoom and waved it about trying to locate the subject, the bird has flown! A (very) high speed zoom would do the trick. Anyone know of one at budget prices!
Graham

here' a tip that won't cost a penny and may solve your problem:
hand anybody a tube, or camera, or scope and ask them to look thru it, and you'll notice the human instinct is to close one eye and hold the object up to the other eye to look.
train your self to hold your camera up to one eye, while keeping the other eye open and you'll soon be spotting with the "naked" eye then switching you focus to the "camera eye" just prior to releasing the shutter.

I've often thought that, when faced with a macro shot, bracketed focussing would be useful. It ought to be simple enough to instruct the modern 'intelligent' camera where you want the forward and rear focus points to be and how many 'slices' you want, then it can do the maths and take 3, 4, or 5 shots between these 2 datum points. Then we can spend hours stitching them together to get a resulting image where the whole of the spider, fly or plant etc. is in focus. Maybe even the camera can blend the shots itself but leave the originals as well so that we can try and make a better job of it

The shallow depth of field shots are good but if you actually want to capture and study all of the detail in a particular subject, it can be quite difficult to achieve and sometimes, impossible.

This of course would only be useful if the magnification of the lens remained constant within a particular focussing range . . . but small changes in magnification might not be too troublesome. to correct.

I'd like an lcd filter built into the flash units that balances the flash output to match the ambient color esp when using custom white balance settings.