How has digital photography changed photography?

I don`t think that digital photography has changed much but the total amount of photos taken and money spent for gear (amateur level). For professionals, it has made things much easier (deadlines, instant control).

Personally, I don`t care much about the convenience of digital cameras but still like developing film and experimenting with different film / developer combinations.
 
Pickett, Steve what I meant was "the 80% of the wannabe or self-acclaimed good photographers". Not the bulk of the common people who just want a picture for any occasion and want the camera to do the work. And because of that my comment also excluded the bulk of the people who bought P&S film cameras.

And yes I agree that we learn as we go along. But IMHO expensive equipment that does everything for you *including* taking out the costs of developing (just one of many aspects) can have serious impact on your learning curve if you are a serious noob in photography.

BTW, I should mention that I'm not against automation or digital. I'm all for it. It saves me tons of money and is extremely helpful when I have to perform rather than think about every shot. But I think serious learning of photography should start with a fully mechanical do-everything-yourself camera which happen to be only film in the present day.

My Ultimate Dream I wish they could make some kind of digital film (more like real film and not those bigass and expensive digital backs) which all noobs could use in fully mechanical cameras. I always dream of how they could make it and what features it could/should have. At least they should make some cheap digital alternative to the expensive DSLRs or the insanely expensive Leicas.
 
Maybe it is me... but to me the "digital workflow" is not necessarily faster. Scanned film is faster, for what I do. It is certainly easier for me to get the effects I want when developing the film, than to play with photoshop for a long time. On a related note, I had to learn to take a good picture if I want to have anything to work with whan I take only one or two frames of something.

I prefer only having to deal with one or two of the same pictures. It makes my life easier. I know, you can shoot digital that way, too.

All that being said: at it's base, it does not matter even a little bit whether the image capture medium is a ccd or film. If it is getting the image you wanted, the camera worked.

If you have enough information (megapixels / film size / beads on a counting board / whatever) you can make a print of X size without it looking crappy.

What bothers me is the trend towards silky smoothness. I don't like it, and it looks unnatural. It is almost (but not quite) as bad as the trend towards CGI people in the movies. I like to have expressions on people faces. I like to have details in flowers. I never was a fan of airbrushes.

Digital makes that easy. Possibly necessary.

I also like blacks and contrast, but these are merely trends in what is being produced. The mechanism for producing it does not really matter.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
I think it has shifted the importance away from the gear and toward the image. I don't hear about many people fondling digital cameras and talking about them as cult objects as I've always heard with film cameras. Folks tend to buy digital cameras to shoot photos.
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Funny. I find the exact opposite. People now seem obsessed with MP, MB, DR, bit depth, etc, etc. It appears now peple have becme more of a gear head and have lost the interest in discussing photography as an art form.
 
Digital photography has made it so easy to manipulate images that it will soon come to pass (if it hasn't already) that no one with any brains between their ears will believe any image has any connection to what might be construed in the conventional sense as reality. What has been lost because of that is up to you to decide.
 
imokruok said:
Chris101 said:
Pre-digital photography required storage and maintenance of physical items: negatives, transparencies and prints. Digital files can be duplicated exactly with ease, and so their storage is delocalized. They can be sorted, grouped, combined, sequenced and blended with other media. From the image's point of view - after it leaves the camera - digital has changed everything about photography.
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Very true. But I think digital manipulation is almost entirely another issue, as for the most part, my workflow is basically the same whether the image came from a slide or a sensor. I don't print from film - I just have it all scanned.

I think film-to-digital is a great combo, because I do have the flexibility of using a digital workflow. But I also have the originals in an archival sleeve. I would guess that for much of the camera-toting population, many pictures older than five or six years old reside on the hard drive of an old computer sitting in a closet or basement.
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I don't think that easy manipulation is the only thing, or even the main thing about digital. The predominance of images online make them especially different than prints whether they be in a book or in a box. Online pictures can be linked to other pictures, or other kinds of digital content. There is a lot more new stuff to digital than just image manipulation.

In this grand scheme of easy duplication and interlinked, digital images, the impact of a single image is reduced. And so people care about their individual pictures less. That is why they languish on disks, which are approaching their (effective) MTBF.
 
Digital is great! It helps rapidly take pictures of price tags in shop, teard down sequences of film gear, and many more useful things when film route would be little too slow.

Plus ir adjusted market to allow us poor guys use film equipment we couldn't easily allow before.
 
It's made it damm hard to make a steady paycheck like it was when it was just film and professional people took pictures......now everyone and their Mother thinks they can take good photos and no one wants to pay good money to have anything done professional anymore, people in general have lost their use for professional photoraphy due to having digital cameras at every corner.

I really find it even CHEAPER now to shoot real film and the quality is STILL better than any digital in my book, it's really not easy to make a living shooting as I used to, now I sell rare collectable WW2 era Leica's, there's more money in that than taking pictures.

Needless to say I HATE digital photography, I only have/use my M8 to backup shooting with real film, I'll use and shoot film till the very end......

Tom
 
For whom has it changed? People have always had cameras, millions upon millions have been made, all those instamatics etc. Now days you get see the latest snaps of relatives and friends lot quicker and they are still mostly mundane just like the good ol days. At least back in the time of film you did not have store the d...m things, now you gotta have a folder on your puter somewhere just in case aunty visits and enquires whether or not you received the photos of little Jimmy.
Digital has`nt really changed `photography' that much. It sure has changed the way in which we see and distribute images though.
Yes anyone with a DSLR is now a wedding photograher, i never see any of the established profressionals at weddings here anymore. It is always `uncle bill' and a bunch of Paris Hilton wanabees with a phone camera taking the shots.
 
"Digital photography has made it so easy to manipulate images that it will soon come to pass (if it hasn't already) that no one with any brains between their ears will believe any image has any connection to what might be construed in the conventional sense as reality."

Photography has never depicted reality. I have looked at Ansel Adams photos and have been to the places he shot them, and they were not the same.
 
I knew that ridiculous argument would come up. C'mon, are you really that argumentative? The difference between what can and is frequently done in the manipulation of digital image files and what Adams et al were able to do with negatives and prints is like the difference between a NASA space shuttle and my son's paper airplane. Don't play with semantics. There are huge, demonstrable differences.
 
visiondr said:
I knew that ridiculous argument would come up. C'mon, are you really that argumentative? The difference between what can and is frequently done in the manipulation of digital image files and what Adams et al were able to do with negatives and prints is like the difference between a NASA space shuttle and my son's paper airplane. Don't play with semantics. There are huge, demonstrable differences.
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Dear Ron,

Presumably you never worked in advertising when 'comping' (combining images optically, often via masking, and mechanically, then retouching and rephotographing) was quite often used when the budget could stand it. I've seen an 11x14 inch transparency of Concorde flying under a suspension bridge...

Nor are you familiar with combination printing, such as O.G. Reijlander's The Two Ways of Life (1857) assembled from over 30 different negatives.

This is not empty semantics. The only difference is that it's a lot easier (and cheaper) nowadays.

Cheers,

R.
 
Ron, if you totally change the look of a photo in the darkroom, as Adams did with Moonrise, Hernandez...from a light sky to a dark and boding one, you are creating a lie. Just because you didn't do it in Photoshop doesn't change that fact.
 
You're so right. Of course, I'm an idiot. I forgot that Adams didn't actually insert the moon into an otherwise moonless night (which would have taken 20 seconds in Photoshop). Or that he didn't enlarge the moon in the final image beyond the size in his viewfinder (Glass screen). Again, you fail to see the differences in scale. Are you arguing for fun or do you really believe that the ability to manipulate a digital file is no different than the ability to manipulate negatives and a print?

Your correct assertion that manipulation of photographic output has been around for some time is still largely one of semantics, Roger precisely because it is so easy to make a convincing fake today versus yesterday. It is that simplicity and near seamless perfection that will soon destroy any assumption in the minds of viewers about an image's provenance. If that doesn't disturb you, you're either lying to yourself in order to score a rhetorical point or you should take up painting.
 
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Hey folks. My post was about how digital photography has changed your own photography. Not so much about issues of whether manipulation is good or not or what's better digital or film. But how has it effected both how you shoot and what you shoot.

For me it has opened up room to experiment. When shooting a model I can shoot as many images as I had with film but I can now review images midshoot and that often given me new ideas or how to readjust the lighting. Seeing the image on a monitor is a better feedback loop for me than the old Polaroid backs provided.

And I have among other digitals a 'superzoom' with a 500mm equivalent lens. With 35mm I never had anything longer than a 200mm. Suddenly this little camera, IS and superzoom opened up another visual space for my photography.

So digital has given me the tools to expand my vision in a number of ways and I am thankful for that.

And I was one of those early naysayers. When digital came out I really hated it. It was slow and clumsy and the early Nikon 2MP cameras made more struggle than film. But the world has changed and so have I.

So back to what I wanted to hear, how has digital changed your photography?

Hawkeye
 
I won't address the obvious (no film, virtually unlimited images, product lifecycle... ect.) But will add something else for my $0.02. Fundamentally, digital has changed photography (and by that I mean, strictly, the images produced, the characteristics of the final output... "the picture") because it changed the very "nature" of the images created:

1. Most images are captured on a plane that is extremely small now. In the film days, the "upper limit" of the ability of a photographic tool's "quality range" was determined mostly by the size of the film plane that the lens focused the image on. From large format, to medium format to small format - each step to a smaller size, reduced the outer limit of the quality of the image produced in the hands of a technically competent amateur or professional photographer. Ansel Adams' prints would not have had the enduring impact they had if they were shot with a 35mm camera - even a Leica with one of their top of the line lenses. However, the trade-off was equipment size. 35mm was deemed "good enough" for most applications. HCB could not have shot what he shot walking around France with a large format camera. Also, the number of images produced increased with smaller format and the speed with which you could create these images increased as you stepped down the film plane scale.

2. Digital took this to the next level. The "focusing plane" of a digital sensor is significantly smaller that the small format frame of 35mm film for most users. Thus, the outer limit of quality is not as great as that of a film camera. It's "all" (mostly) about the size of the plane the lens is focusing the image on. The size of this plane is 3/4ths the determining variable of the technical "outer limit" of the quality capable of the photographic tool with the other variable being (the vastly overrated in modern times) the technical specs of the lens.

3. However, digital has vastly decreased the number of "spoiled" images because state-of-the art computer chips are able to handle all the variables associated with taking a technically acceptable image - including focus, that in the film era resulted in unusable images. The spoil rate is pretty high (and costly) in film, especially for consumers but also for enthusiasts and pros. You pay for those spoiled shots. And sometimes that includes a whole roll.

Thus digital has "moved the curve" - far fewer spoiled images, and there is no cost for spoilage. Most spoiled images have less to do with shots being out of focus, blurry due to too low a shutter speed, way under/over exposed to to a mis-set aperture, and especially ruined shots due to an improperly set flash... than compositional issues or "somebody had their eyes closed" in the "say cheese" group shot. Even harsh color casts due to tungsten or florescent lighting is largely eliminated. This is a significant quality improvement - but on the left side of the bell-shaped curve with the trade-off being that the cameras are incapable of producing images of higher "quality" (sophistication may be a better word choice here...) on the right side of the bell-shaped curve.

4. Another underrated change regarding the digital revolution is the compact digital super zoom cameras. Leveraging the smaller film plane and combining it with image stabilization technology enabled small light cameras that are capable of hand-holding shots and getting acceptable images with zoom lenses no bigger than a standard 50mm in the film world that would have to have been extremely large, heavy, (and expensive) stationary lenses requiring them to be mounted on a tripod in the film era. This is an unheraleded breakthrough, and these cameras are excellent street shooters. As the old adage goes - "Wanna take better pics? Get closer to the subject..." These cameras allow you to "get closer" from across the street. One of these cameras should be part of every "street photographer's" arsenal. Used, many are dirt cheap especially the "early" Panny's with excellent ASPH Leica branded/designed lenses from way back 5 years ago.
 
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Oh - "PS" - forgot to add. The extent to which you disagree with me on this, see above post, (or any topic I give my "opinion" on) is equally proportionate to the degree to which you are incorrect in your assessment.
 
hawkeye said:
Hey folks. My post was about how digital photography has changed your own photography. Not so much about issues of whether manipulation is good or not or what's better digital or film. But how has it effected both how you shoot and what you shoot.
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My apologies, I did not intend to hijack this thread.

Still, I thought I'd share this amusing set of photos:
Which photograph was staged? ;):D

1674380391_4f758a03cf.jpg



bressonbehindnew.jpg
 
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