Michelle Ogg may be an HP firmware development engineer, but her 7-year-old twin sons know the truth – she makes digital cameras fun.
While they don’t understand all the mechanics of how cameras work, the twins know that their mother makes it possible for the photo to show up on the small LCD screen when they push a button on a digital camera.
“One of my sons makes me pose for pictures,” said Ogg, 42. “They know that I get to do a really cool job.”
Ogg is responsible for many of the software features found inside HP’s line of digital cameras, such as slide-show viewing capability and the ability to remove blemishes from faces.
HP’s Design Gallery is a growing part of the company’s digital photo work, which is developed in Fort Collins.
The goal is to make digital photo editing easy for novices, without the use of complex, intimidating photo-editing software.
Prior to working on digital cameras, Ogg developed software for HP’s storage and scanning divisions. She has earned the company several patents for her work on photo imaging and how camera lenses zoom in and out. She’s been with HP for 20 years, starting as an intern in the manufacturing support division in Colorado Springs.
Her scrapbooking hobby comes in handy, as she and other enthusiasts generally take a lot of photographs. Generally, people don’t know that HP cameras are designed in Fort Collins.
“I get to talk to a lot of people and they often say, ‘I wish my camera would do this,”‘ she said. “The ideas are never-ending. But one of the challenges is to do it in the two- to three-second time frame people expect, or with one or two buttons.”
