Digital Photography

Photography using a reusable sensor instead of single-use light sensitive material to record the image.

With digital photography capabilities being added to cell phones, PDAs and even Game Boys, as well as the ability to edit those photos on the personal computer, Digital photography will likely replace the standard film format as the snapshot media. (There will remain 4X5, 8X10, 2 1/4 and 35mm cameras being used, but they will become as increasingly rare as the turntable has with the advent of digital music.)

As the quality of the sensors increases, more professional photographers are choosing digital photography as the media of choice.

Digital has some significant advantages over film, especially immediate viewing of the results. If you don't like a picture, then delete it and try again. With film you have to take a dozen shots and hope one is what you want. You won't know until they are developed hours or days later.

It is worth noting that the field of web site development has particularly benefitted from this last advantage; web site clients want to know what the images you make of their place of business looks like before the site is built. With a good digital camera (such as a Canon or Nikon) one can go to the client's site, set up, shoot interiors and exteriors, download everything to the laptop, then show the images right there in the client's conference room. If you are really hip you will have a prototype of the site ready to go -- you can post process the images and stick 'em into your prototype site, right there on the laptop! (PHP, Apache, and Tomcat are great for this. The footprint is so small everything runs on a 256MB 1GHz P3 laptop.)

Having a DigitalCamera gives the photographer-artist a much larger realm to express themselves. Using a standard software package, a DigitalPhotography artist can manipulate and layer their own work, as well as using DigitalPhotographyStock?. There are now many websites that offer stock images, either free or at a price, for the DigitalPhotography Artist to use.

Some of these sites are:

It is good to note that some non-digital photographers have the belief that DigitalPhotography undermines the artistic nature of film photography, by being able to change colour balance and use effects at will, a DigitalPhotographer? may 'deceive' the viewer into believing something that doesn't exist. This opinion is also one held by feminists who do not agree with deceiving teens with airbrushed celebrities.

Technically, this is a different opinion - they've been airbrushing photos for years in analog photography. From an art stance, it doesn't matter. From a news stance, it matters, because altered photos affect the mood of the viewer differently. There was a flap over a news magazine that 'adjusted' some photos of soldiers in Iraq, making them appear more threatening then they were.

I wonder if anybody here can enlighten me on the usefulness of the "field camera"? It looks to me that it may be a revolution in photography in that it captures an image whose focus and perhaps depth-of-field can be altered in post-production. http://www.lytro.com/

If you think DigitalPhotography and DigitalCamera is OffTopic for c2.com, please move their text to a more relevant wiki, rather than deleting them.

Art Wiki: http://visual.wiki.taoriver.net/ See: DigitalCamera, ChemicalVsDigitalCameras