I can see, amongst the barely noticed pages of my irregular blog, that there’s been a fair bit of interest in my articles on the Arsenal AI camera add-on. Ok, so it’s probably time to admit how little I’m using it, but how useful it is being when I do.
To recap, the Arsenal was kickstarted a while back and has recently caught up with most of it’s back orders. It’s a small plastic encased pile of electrickery that uses AI (artificial intelligence) to make the best image out of what the camera is pointed at. Not an easy thing, when you consider Canon, Sony, Nikon etc have yet to implement anything similar in their own cameras.
I bought into it back then when I wanted facilities that my Canon 7D mk 1 didn’t have. I now mainly shoot a 5D mk 3 and some of the need is gone. However, the 5D3 doesn’t have wifi or wireless remote control, and it’s here that the Arsenal is adding most value.
For example, at my local camera group there is often a task set on the evening, to take a shot and put it forward for the group’s consideration and critique (not winners, no losers, not a camera club). To do this, some of us have to resort to moving memory cards from camera to laptop in order to present photographs on the big screen via digital projector.
Those with wireless internet access can simply move the images to Flickr, where the members have a group, which can then be displayed on the screen. Those without, like me with the 5D3, well it’s a ball-ache. The Arsenal is worth much simply for the ability to move shots from the camera via Arsenal to the iPhone and thence to the Flickr group.
Ok, it does a lot more than that, but I’ve yet to find a single simple image it takes that I couldn’t do as well or better in human-controlled manual. Current software, by the way, is 0.9.21
I foresee the remote control being useful for bird table shots, and while I can manage perfectly well without the exposure stacking option I am looking forward to playing with the focus stacking function now it’s partially implemented, as well as the long exposure blending (which may reduce the need for ND blockers).
No doubt I’ll waffle about those in a future article.
