Do you need face detection on your digital camera and why

The most popular subject for photographs far and above everything else is people.Whether it is your child (or children or grandchildren) other family or friends that we are photographing it is the people we value the most that we want really great pictures of.That's where face detection on your digital camera comes in.Because the truth is this people are by far the most popular photographic subjects and they all have faces!

Shooting a frame-filling close-up of your child eating an ice cream cone does not usually pose much of a technical problem for the auto focus and auto exposure systems built into today's compact digital cameras. These systems will focus on her face and generally give you an excellent exposure. But when you place that toddler's face off-center near the edge of the frame, compose a double portrait of mom and dad, or photograph a group of people sitting around the dinner table, things start getting a lot more interesting and a lot more complex.

Regular auto focus systems, even those with multiple auto focus zones, will sometimes miss the faces and focus on something else that's between them, farther away, or even closer. The result becomes that the people in your picture will be out of focus, blurry, and over- or underexposed which we all know is not a good thing.

When the Face Detection system in your digital camera is turned on, it identifies the main face and puts it in a frame and subsidiary faces (also framing them) and calculates optimum focus and exposure.The Face Detection System in these cameras prioritizes the faces closest to center of frame.

You can manually lock the focus on your intended subject by holding in the shutter button partway, recomposing, and shooting. But in the excitement of the moment, it's easy to forget. And even though this process only takes a moment to auto focus the manual way, in that brief instant the perfect shot can slip away.

A number of leading camera manufacturers have addressed this sticky problem literally head-on, and have come up with ingenious solutions known as Face Recognition, Face Detection, or Face Priority Mode. What face identification is a form of pattern recognition when you turn on the camera's face detection system, the auto focus and auto exposure systems analyze the objects appearing within the borders of the frame, and compare them with algorithms stored in the camera's electronic memory. When face patterns are detected (up to 10 in some systems, fewer in others), the camera focuses on your intended subjects, and exposes the subjects properly. Not all face detection systems work exactly the same way.Each has their own system when it comes to identifying and prioritizing multiple faces within a frame, but all provide some kind of readout on the LCD usually with a frame around the prioritized face.This is to let you know what the camera is focusing on so you can override its decision if you disagree. Some systems can be turned off when you're photographing subjects other than people, such as landscapes or pets. Others are on all the time, regardless of the settings on the camera. The manufacturers of these cameras claim that their systems can tell with a high degree of certainty when there are faces in the picture.

Face detection systems are not foolproof and do not perform miracles in photographic work.There are limits on each system and what it will do.But most photographers who regularly use this system say they do a remarkably good job well over 90% of the time.And the main advantage of doing so is that they automatically do it without the need for time consuming user intervention.

The only thing you have to remember with face detection is how it works with your particular camera.If your camera has a user selectable feature recognition system you will have to turn it on and off if not don't worry about it.Face detection is just another example of the high functionality of digital cameras.While you don't have to have it to take good pictures having it in your camera can help you take great ones.