Photokina - Fujfilm face recognition in action

[Ian]

Naturally, I just had to get my ugly mug in a Photokina report, but what better way to do it than this?!

One of the key technologies Fujifilm was showing at Photokina was face recognition. This has obvious uses, such as directing the AF to ensure portraits are in focus and to enable instant zoomed-in preview of faces to check that eyes aren't closed or faces are not, otherwise, quite right. It's a feature of the forthcoming Fujifilm FinePix S5 Pro DSLR.

On the Fujifilm booth there was a large screen with a FinePix camera pointing at passers by like me, showing how the camera could lock on to one's face.

The self-portrait above was made a bit easier by using the Live View feature of the Olympus E-330 DSLR I was using, with the LCD screen at waist-level angle so I could frame and thing look up at the screen.

The face recognition system unlocks itself from you if you look down or away and framing by looking through the lens of a DSLR would have been impossible in this shot.

Ian

[Stephen]

I have seen so many photos where the subject is out of focus because the camera has focused behind or on something else. This sounds like a feature to solve the problem, but especially for those people who don't appreciate such things when taking family photographs etc