Photography is not a new tool in research. In 1872, Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge to conduct photographic experiments testing his idea that at one point in its gait, a horse has all four feet off the ground. That research led to the development of motion pictures. But most people don't use cameras to advance the frontiers of science or industry. That's one of the biggest challenges in photography.
Film does a very good job of that.
Digital cameras and video cameras don't do as well. Images taken in bright environments need short film or pixel exposure times, and those taken in dim environments need long exposure times. Its algorithm waits until the right moment for each individual pixel to assemble a final picture with perfect exposure throughout the image. Wandell, an expert in human vision and color perception, says working with cameras gives him ideas for hypotheses about how the brain processes images. He and students including Jeffrey DiCarlo and Peter Catrysse in electrical engineering and Feng Xiao in psychology have used ideas from human vision to create image-processing algorithms to optimize the image quality for printing or display on a computer monitor.