In a cold January in 1981 I traveled with noted landscape photographer Ed Cooper down Highway 95, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. We camped along the way in his Toyota Dolphin RV in temperatures as cold as -25 degrees. Setting up in the clear winter skies, we captured the full moon setting over Mt,. Whitney, in early morning a frozen stream at Mammoth Lakes, the magnificent sculpted rocks in the Alabama Hills. Eating only trail mix we pretty much gave up on other comforts, knowing that these were small sacrifices for the pleasures of setting up bulky 4x5 view cameras, then witnessing and capturing on Ektachrome sheet film a magnificent slice of the American West.
I joked with Ed about a make-believe camera, called a "Composamat." I thought it would be perfect for amateurs, a camera that wouldn't let you take a photograph until you had composed the scene perfectly. Some joke. Relonch has created one that goes much farther than that.
The founder of Relonch simply wants to eliminate all the painstaking stuff that photographers had to learn before they took a photograph—like seeing and understanding light and how it changes or enhances an image, how to compose for the best effect, what aperture and shutter speeds are, and how they can make or break an image. He said, "Our aim is to eliminate the countless complications associated with photography so we chose to create the camera as a service model rather than just hardware or software. Our service gives members the ability to solely focus on the experience, on the moment itself." You can't even see the image that you take with a Relonch camera. The photos are automatically uploaded to Relonch's server, where they're edited using an "algorithm-based approach' the company calls, 'Pictured Techology." The company's algorithms take lighting conditions into account, so photos you get from the camera "actually look like what you pictured."
You don't even own the camera. Relonch does. You pay them $99 a month, too, to become another Annie Leibovitz. With their camera. What does she know, anyhow?
A well-known photographer was being honored with a dinner party at a woman's home who collected his photographs "What kind of camera do you use?' she asked. "Your photographs are so lovely." Later the photographer complimented her on her dinner. "What kind of oven did you use?" he asked.
Folks, it ain't the oven; it's the chef, not the hammer but the carpenter, not the scalpel but the doctor, not the algorithms. or the camera. It's the photographer..