The Descriptive Camera

Using a digital camera, Mechanical Turk, and a thermal printer, Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera outputs descriptions of photos instead of the photos themselves.

After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

This seems like a distant cousin of Unphotographable. (via hacker news)

• Matt Richardson
• photography