People tend to believe that the more intelligent a camera they have, the better the resulting photographs will be. And there may be an air of truth to that, particularly in the realm of smartphones brimming with algorithms to produce reasonably good pictures. But the thing it that the subject of the photographs, and characteristics like the perspective of the shot are not decided by the camera – they are decided by the artistic-process of the person behind the camera.

It is a combination of the human brain, visual system and intrinsic aesthetic abilities of the photographer that decides what to photograph. The camera is but a tool. You can have the most expensive Leica, with the sharpest lenses, but all that is moot if you cannot take good photographs. Sure, everyone thinks they are a photographer these days. The ubiquity of cameras in mobile devices means that photography is all around us, but apart from a documentary purpose, very little of this is meaningful or even artful photography.

The reality is that human intelligence is much smarter than the artificial intelligence found in digital cameras. Yes, such AI can efficiently process photosites into pixels, and apply intelligent “improvement” algorithms in the process, but they cannot decide what to photograph.