When taking still photographs, a photographer needs to select a particular instant in time in which to capture an image. Whether or not the image will be pleasing to the eye, however, will depend on the photographers ability to recognize good photographic composition and to anticipate the time when the photograph should be taken to capture such composition. The photographic composition task is not trivial and involves conscious anticipation of action and movement of the photographer in order to compare alternative viewpoints.
Generally speaking, the average person taking a photograph will not want to spend time considering composition factors, the end result being that many memorable events go un-recorded or poorly-recorded. One way in which this problem is reduced in film-based cameras is to provide a motor-drive mechanism which automatically winds-on the camera film to allow photographs to be taken at the highest rate possible. Of course, such film-based cameras (being bulky and mainly mechanical in their film-winding structure) are limited in terms of the rate at which photographs can be taken and ultimately produce a large number of photographs which are of no use or interest to the photographer. Digital cameras, which are being increasingly used, are able to capture photographic images at a faster rate than their non-digital counterparts. Thus, a user is able to select the better images, from a compositional point of view, from the large number of total images captured and stored. However, such cameras still suffer from the disadvantage that a large number of captured images will be of no use or interest to the photographer. Since such cameras have a limited memory capacity, such unwanted images take up significant amounts of storage space and so frequent ‘clearing-out’ operations have to be performed, as well as post-editing to sort out the good-photos from the bad (and thus still requiring the user to have some appreciation of composition).