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I'm a novice to photography and I'm wondering if its possible to combine multiple cameras to get a greater level of precision? I'm thinking that if you capture more light you should be able to improve the quality?

What is the name of this process?

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  • Multiple cameras exposing at the same time implies multiple exposures with different perspectives -- are you talking about trying to combine these multiple outputs into a single 2-D image?
    – D. Lambert
    Aug 13, 2012 at 19:19
  • Yes into a single image from multiple cameras possibly with different properties.
    – Ben Crowhurst
    Aug 13, 2012 at 19:29
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    The reason why a VLA (very large array) telescope can work the way it does is that the parallax (the difference in point of view between one 'scope and the next) is negligible. For targets closer to home, cameras that are a mere 6.5cm apart (about the distance between your own pupils) have a different enough viewpoint to render a stereoscopic image for everyday things; the spatial relationships between foreground and background objects shifts quite a bit.
    – user2719
    Aug 13, 2012 at 20:24
  • There are also HDR images (High dynamic range) where you combine multiple exposures
    – 10 Replies
    May 31, 2017 at 13:29

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Using multiple cameras to shoot the same subject were first done on television in the 1920s. Cinerama is a widescreen process that use three film cameras and then three film projectors.

By the way, taking shots of the same subject with different camera settings, by one or more cameras, is called Bracketing.

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    Sublime answer.
    – Skippy Fastol
    Aug 14, 2012 at 15:40
  • Did you mean to mark this community wiki and not get credit for it?
    – mattdm
    Aug 14, 2012 at 15:56
  • @mattdm Ooops !
    – William C
    Aug 14, 2012 at 16:25
  • If you want, you can flag it for a mod to un-wiki it.
    – mattdm
    Aug 14, 2012 at 18:54
  • And if by precision you mean increasing the effective aperture/resolving power, it's called optical interferometry.
    – Mark
    Apr 28, 2015 at 11:58
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What you are suggesting is very much along the lines of how radio telescope arrays work.

Overlaying multiple images from the same camera (be that video or still) is a well known way to reduce noise (it normalises the image) or to gather more detail in low resolution images.

To grab small areas, for example faces from CCTV, it is possible to use multiple cameras.

However I don't know what the process is called.

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