How AI Is Breathing New Life Into Digital SLR Cameras

To the throngs of those who’ve put down their complicated digital SLR cameras in favor of easy-to-use smartphones, Ryan Stout has a message: Not so fast. Stout is the founder, CEO and lead developer of Arsenal, a six-person, Montana-based startup that’s using computer vision to intelligently automate the abundant capabilities of DSLR cameras. Stout admits he himself had become a smartphone-dependent photographer. But several years ago, he decided to pull his camera out and start taking night photos. From setting shutter speeds, apertures and ISOs to choosing just the right filter, he was quickly reminded that photography is an intensely technical undertaking. He suspected he wasn’t alone in wanting to simplify the photography experience in general. And with an earlier experience as founder of a company that used recurrent neural networks to enable natural language processing, he thought he might have a solution: machine learning.