Dennis Walker

Dennis Walker is the Founder and President of Camera Bits, Inc., makers of the Photo Mechanic image browser and the Quantum Mechanic plug-in. Dennis started Camera Bits in 1996 with its first product, the Quantum Mechanic noise filter plug-in for Photoshop. But Dennis’ original product focus was Photo Mechanic, which was released in 1997 and is now a mainstay of digital photojournalists for browsing and captioning their photos. Photo Mechanic was also the chosen browser for the America 24/7 project, perhaps the largest photojournalism project in history. Please visit www.camerabits.com.

As a photography enthusiast and software engineer, not a working photographer, Dennis was lucky to begin his profession in digital photography with a loaner DCS 460 from Kodak (at the time a $26,000 6 mega-pixel Nikon SLR). A graduate of UC San Diego with BAs in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology, Dennis quickly applied his knowledge and experience in image processing to improve the quality of digital photographs. The Quantum Mechanic and Band Aide plug-in noise reduction filters were the result of Dennis¹ experience in adaptive filtering techniques. In 1997 Dennis created the DCS Photo plug-in for opening raw Kodak DCS files, which included advanced anti-aliasing techniques and exposure compensation (a first for the unlucky users of the early Kodak 4xx cameras where over-exposure meant death to the photo).

Dennis’ work with Photo Mechanic and the newspaper industry have made him a somewhat unintentional authority on meta-data (especially IPTC) captioning. But Dennis mostly enjoys the challenges of creating a productive photo editing workflow for professionals who handle large numbers of photos, and the wonder of seeing mathematical equations make beautiful photos.

Prior to forming Camera Bits, Dennis worked with neural networks, image processing, and parallel processing. In 1987, Dennis co-authored Dungeon Master (on an Atari ST), one of the first real-time 3D dungeon and dragons adventure games and which won several awards.

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