Since a painful arm injury three months ago, I’ve discovered the joys of Windows Speech Recognition—a built in program in Microsoft’s Vista operating system.  My arm still hasn’t healed—the hazards of a lifetime of keyboard work—but even when it does I will probably continue to dictate to the computer.  It’s wonderful to run the computer without touching it.  Kind of mystical, almost like talking to Hal on “2001.”

What you do is, talk into a headset microphone in a pretty normal and rapid tone of voice.  It almost seems like the faster, the better, as the computer does a better job following along when you don’t stop.

So, in fact, I’m sitting back in my chair at this moment dictating this blog post.

What’s this got to do with photography?  Not clear—but somehow I can imagine controlling the camera someday in the future by voice.

Scenic mode:

“Take a picture of that sunset!”

Portrait mode:

“Shallow depth of field. Low ISO. Focal length 80. Snap.”

After writing a story for the newspaper about using speech recognition software, I got an e-mail from a woman—a quadriplegic—who uses WSR to run a computer in the nursing home where she lives.  Just think: she could be a voice photographer, documenting her rather different life.  I’m going to see her on Friday.

photo: Winter cabbage, 2009