Non-optimal Photography

Nonoptimal Photography is a collection of custom cameras and their resulting images. Each camera has a unique capture function that subverts a user's expectation of what a camera should record. Each camera is designed to counter a hyper optimized aspect of computational photography.

Using the cameras challenges a users relationship with photography and are a meditation on software mediation of modern photography. Through repeated use of a camera you begin to become familiar with its affordances and your expectations of the resulting images changes. You begin to change what you point the camera at and what you choose to take a picture of to meet the biases of the software. This illustrates how the camera software is not neutral and impacts our decisions of what and how to take pictures. This project's goal is to illustrate this through its opposite, algorithmic interventions that cannot be ignored.

More information about this project, including the source files can be found at nonoptimal.photography.