How has digital photography changed photography?

[cliffpov]

Its made it much more affordable for me to get my dream camera's and set up my dark room and I am having a ball with it.

It has made Nikon, Canon, and the rest of the Japanese camera corporations a heck of a lot of money.

It has made a lot of photography newbies feel important walking around with that HUGE DSLR and telephoto lens.

 

[re_visible]

Digital took out the "object", the photographic print, out of the whole process, and left behind only bare naked ideas.

An idea originaly conserved as a material, a REAL object, is now stored as information in a device, or even worse, in the "cloud".

It starts as an idea in our mind (like it did in the past) and ends as an idea in the "matrix" (it's all 0 and 1 now, it is just not real).


Yes, digital changed photography beyond recognition!!!

And for me, who learned about photography with a digital camera and then went "back" to film, it is two complete separate forms of artistic expression.


For me the film (the object, be it a negative or a polaroid print) IS a part of photography.
"Digital Photography" should be called somehow else, perhapse just "Digital Imaging"?

 

[Steve M.]

I no longer have to worry about being arrested when going to the lab to pick up my "art" photos 🙂

But seriously, it's nearly ruined the quality of photographs. There is so much crap out there that just looks awful and people don't even know it. 90% of movies on TV I can't stand to watch because it's shot digitally now and it looks so very bad. Amazingly bad. And looking at digital B&W makes my skin crawl. It's so ugly, or worse, boring and banal.

 

[Colin Corneau]

All a student needs is the camera, and that's the end of the expense.

Dear GOD, where to begin...

The expense is only beginning. You pay for a computer (hardware) and program (software) to take what's on the memory card and make it a photograph. Oh, did we mention if you want it to be a photograph you have to either pay to get it printed, or pay to buy a printer.

Costs of ink, paper, etc. is ongoing, of course. As is maintenance for the camera and computer.

Your digital camera has a practical lifespan of 3-5 years. After that -- surprise! -- you get to spend more money. Ditto for the computer, printer, etc.

I'm not saying one is 'better' than another (whatever that means, anyway) since I make my mortgage payments from a digital camera. I find my joy with film, FWIW.

 

[jan normandale]

I think digital photography has made most photographic images disposable at best and at worst, worthless.

The tsunami of digital images world wide eclipses film based image making in total for any year chosen. Phone cameras, keychain cameras, DSLR's that take 5 images per second all add up to way more images than people ever took using "expensive" film and cameras. Digital cameras cost less in earning power to purchase the equivalent of a consumer camera in the 1950's and similarly for the cost of making a print. Thus there's an ocean of cameras 'capturing images' at this moment.

The world of professional photography has hard drives with multiple terabytes of storage per person, amateurs are 'capturing' kittens and sunsets at an alarming rate, just check flickr, photobucket, picasa, jpg and many more photo-based sites. This means there's a googol of images at this moment and it's growing exponentially. It's a basic law that surplus reduces value.

As Roger points out, image manipulation begins in the camera's chip and then moves to the computer. Digital photography is the equivalent of digital music from a Casio synthesizer, preprogrammed for some additional user input within the software constraints of the equipment.

The ease and low cost of entry for digital photography and image manipulation has made photographs disposable and transient.

 

[user237428934]

I think that people who always say "oh the good old days" are a little bit angry that their beloved hobby is nothing special anymore. Perhaps they even heard such reactions while taking photos: "Oh I see you are a photographer. My seven year old son is a photographer too. He takes lovely pictures with his cell phone"

Digital photography is great. It's easier than ever to find good and inspiring photos. 20 years ago I only saw physically published photos (books, magazines, exhibitions). Someone else decided what I was able to see. This was really delimited. There were many good photographers out there but they took the photos for themself and prints were doomed to live in dark cupboards. Now those good photographers can take photos and publish them on the internet and I can look at photos that I could not access in the "good old days".

Positive thinking: more photos means more really good photos (absolutely)
Negative thinking: more photographers without skill producing more crappy photos means less good photos (relatively).

I like the positive approach here.

Perhaps it's getting harder to find the good stuff. Perhaps it's worth to think about clever searching.

 

[sig]

in all the doom and gloom this was a refreshing post!

 

[Colin Corneau]

Look up Edward Burtynsky's take on the "Ten Thousand Year Photo" project. His notion of a "digital dark age" is bang on, IMHO.

 

[Roger Hicks]

While the number of images has exploded, there are lesser choices now than before in terms of gear, lens and formats. Picture taking has been reduced to being almost idiot-proof snapping with mistakes being corrected in Photoshop. And yet, we still see bad pictures. And worst, we confuse Photo-realistic pictures with Photos.

The popularity of Digital Photograpy means that I can now afford the film cameras I could only dream of buying previously.


raytoei

Not really. All the equipment (or almost all of it) from the past is still available, either new or second-hand, and so is the new stuff. This amounts to more choice, not less.

Yes, all right, quite a few black and white printing papers have disappeared. But I'd rather have the modern stuff, in most cases. Certainly, given the choice of losing the best modern papers and the best from the 1960s, goodbye 1960s. And the films? Sure, I miss Fuji RF/RFP. But given that I now have Ektar 100 and an M9, I'd not go back to RF/RFP (my favourite color slide film of all time).

There's really not much from the past that isn't done better nowadays -- plates spring to mind -- and while some film formats are obsolete, there's a bigger choice today than there was 25 years ago. This IS the Golden Age.

Cheers,

R.

 

[jan normandale]

Look up Edward Burtynsky's take on the "Ten Thousand Year Photo" project. His notion of a "digital dark age" is bang on, IMHO.

Colin, I just did a search for Burtynsky and Ten thousand year photo project. I got no returns except for your quote. Do you have a link for this item?