I was excited to find CHDK recently. In a nutshell, it is a free software firmware add-on for certain Canon digital cameras. I couldn't help but notice that the top item on the CHDK feature list is the ability to shoot RAW.

When your camera is 500 feet up hanging from a balloon, how do you tell it when to shoot photos? Or you want to shoot some time-lapse photos of clouds, the changing light on a mountain, a slow-moving highway repair crew...Akkana Peck shows us how to remote-control all kinds of Canon camera functions using CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit.

sujith shares his experiences during the Stallman's visit to Bangalore and captures the event with his Canon PowerShot A720 IS camera powered by free software (CHDK ) !
Read the RMS visit to Bangalore post on his Core Dump blog

Both of the big powerhouses in the digital SLR camera market -- Canon and Nikon -- make software with which you can control your camera from your PC through an attached USB cable. It is a nice tool for situations when manually triggering the shutter might cause shake (such as long exposures), or for automating multiple shots at timed intervals.

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

For those of you who thought managing external devices like digital cameras in Linux was a challenge, I give you DigiKam.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool. This nifty utility allows you to quickly geotag multiple photos in one go and do some other interesting things with them.

ExifTool is a Perl module with an included command-line application
for reading and writing meta information in image, audio and video

Well, it just so happens that the company is no stranger to Linux, because their CURRERA-R series of machine-vision, smart cameras (integrated with an Intel-based personal computer) has support for Linux.