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No good at composing photographs? Are heads or feet always cut off on your holiday snaps? An “autocratic” camera that does the image cropping for you is on the way (WO 02/052835).

You “initialise” Hewlett-Packard’s photo-cropping system by pressing a button while pointing the camera at a typical subject type, such as a single human figure in the foreground. The camera then uses pre-programmed composition rules to frame the scene so that the figure is in the centre, with “artistically positioned” borders.

Among other types of shot, the camera is designed to cope with close-ups of faces so that…

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