Patent ID: 7889919

Claim:
A photographing apparatus comprising: a plurality of light-emitting devices for illuminating a subject and emitting illumination light having characteristics of spectroscopic distributions varied in at least a visible light range; an image pick-up optical system which forms a subject image of a subject illuminated by the light-emitting device; an image pick-up device unit which picks-up the subject image formed by the image pick-up optical system and outputs an image signal; and a control unit which controls lighting-on of the plurality of light-emitting devices and image picking-up by the image pick-up device unit; wherein the photographing apparatus is configured to switch between a spectroscopic image capturing mode for capturing multi-band spectroscopic still images of the subject and a moving image capturing mode for capturing a moving image; wherein in the spectroscopic image capturing mode, the control unit controls the plurality of light emitting devices to sequentially light-on according to the characteristics of spectroscopic distributions, and controls the image pick up device unit to perform a plurality of equential image pick-up operations synchronously with the lighting-on of the light emitting devices to capture multi-band sequential spectroscopic images of the subject; and wherein in the moving image capturing mode, the control unit one of: (i) controls light emitting devices of a single specific primary color or a plurality of specific primary colors selected from the plurality of light emitting devices to light-on sequentially or simultaneously, and (ii) controls a plurality of groups of the light-emitting devices to sequentially light-on group by group, the groups including light-emitting devices having different characteristics of spectroscopic distributions selected from the plurality of light-emitting devices, and the control unit controls the image pick-up device unit to capture a moving image.