controlling DSLR shutter with speech recognition easy VR shield

Using Arduino Project Guidance
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Hi I'm new to the world of hacking, i have learnt a bit of coding before but want to learn some more.

I'm looking at doing a project with an arduino where I would be using speech recognition, probably the 'easy VR shield' to trigger the shutter of a DSLR camera. before buying equipment I wanted a bit of advise on what's the best way to go about this.

-Firstly is this possible, I think yes from seeing people control dslr's, but please stop me if im wrong.

-secondly which arduino would be the best for this, have been looking at one of the arduino MEGA's. any advise?

-thirdly would I be able to save the photos taken on a storage device connected to the arduino instead of in the camera, then say i might want to also show the picture on a screen after each is taken.

-another thing can you connect a higher quality microphone to the easy VR shield than the one provided?

many thanks for anybody's help!

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Triggering a DSLR with Arduino is trivial. Any board can easily do it. All you need is an optocoupler or a small reed relay.
I've never used easy VR, so I can't help you much there, but I've seen videos of it and from what I saw, if you can get it to work and recognize your voice commands (and I'm sure there are plenty of tutorials out there) making Arduino trigger a DSLR is easy.
Forget about pushing any pictures through an Arduino. It's is no good for that kind of stuff. But check the user manual of the camera. It might have the built in functionality that you want. If not, you could also look into eyefi.

For the choice of the board, Uno would suffice and then have plenty of time to twiddle its virtual fingers.