Wet Rose, photo by Harold Davis.

I love my digital cameras, and am blown away by the intelligence built into them. My Nikon D70 gets a great many things right in one of its auto exposure modes. This picture was taken in aperture-preferred mode on a tripod, where I set the aperture and the camera picked the shutter speed, but this is an exception that proves the rule.

For the most part, digital cameras even as elegant as the D70 are old-style SLRs grafted onto a sensor-based digital capture array (instead of film). Why can’t camera manufacturers start thinking about a camera that leaves the evolution of photography behind – and recognizes the reality of digital photography?

I’d like to see:

• A reasonable language and interface for programming my digital camera.
• A mechanism for saving my images directly to my computer via USB when I’m in the studio (this would be faster than Flash card storage, and save a workflow step).
• The three exposure control variables in a camera are ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. You can easily control aperture and shutter speed, but not ISO. This is a holdhover from the days of film, in which the film selected pretty much controlled the ISO you used. In the digital era, ISO should be set via a dial on the surface of the camera, just like aperture and shutter speed.
• A way to easily program bracketing for greater flexibility with exposure

Do you have any suggestions about what a digital camera should be? Please add them as a comment here. Maybe the camera manufacturers will listen to us…