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0.3 THE WORLD OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY | ||
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Digital photography is a new way to capture photos using a solid-state image sensor instead of traditional film. Once captured, the photos are then stored in a universal digital format that lets you move them to a computer, print them on a printer, view them on a television, e-mail them to friends, or even put them on the Web where anyone in the world can see them. Digital photography is becoming increasingly popular because of the flexibility it gives you when you want to use or distribute an image.
Once you've captured an image in digital format, you can easily enhance, distribute, or organize and store it. Courtesy of Intel. It's both the immediacy and flexibility of digital imaging that's made is so popular in so many areas. However, there is one aspect of digital photography that is rarely mentioned. This is the new freedom it gives you to explore photography. In the 1870's when William Henry Jackson was carrying 20 x 24 glass plates around the West on a mule, you can believe he hesitated before he took a photograph. We may not be carrying glass plates, but you and I also hesitate before taking a picture. We're always doing a mental calculation "is it worth it?" Subconsciously we're running down a checklist of costs, times, effort, and so on. During that "decisive moment," the image is often lost or we fail to try new things. We lose the opportunity for creative growth and choose to stay in the familiar rut that's delivered for us in the past. Surprisingly, Jackson had one big advantage we've lost over the last century. If an image didn't turn out, or if he was out of glass plates, he could just scrape off the emulsion from an image he was willing to sacrifice, recoat the plate, and try again. Digital photography not only eliminates that nagging "is it worth it?" question but it also returns us to that era of endlessly reusable film (and we don't need a mule to carry it). Hand the camera to the kids, take weird and unusual angles, shoot without looking through the viewfinder, and ignore all previously held conceptions about how to take images. You may be surprised at the images you get if you exploit this new era of uninhibited shooting.
Perhaps Not the Best Place to Start
People like David Grenewetzki think nothing of strapping their new digital camera to a remote control airplane, or even a rocket, and launching it into the wild blue yonder to capture photos with a bird's-eye view. Until camera prices come way down, you might want to find other applications for your new camera.
What could be more fun than strapping your new camera onto a remote control airplane for pictures from hundreds of feet up! Check out David's site for lots more on this and rockets too. Image © 1997-1998 by David Grenewetzki. Journals
Most of us take lots of photos and then chuck them in a drawer. If we care enough about some, we may even put them in an album. The problem is, we rarely share them with others and after awhile forget a lot about the circumstances under which we took them. Digital images change all of that. They are easy to insert into documents or Web pages along with captions or text. This makes it easy to create journals for personal memories or to share with others. You can post them on the Web for anyone to see, or print copies and give them to people who shared the experiences with you. Everyone can now be a publisher.
Street Photography
There is a grand tradition of photographing on the street, capturing the fast action as it unfurls. This style of photography grew out of the freedom first offered by the 35 mm Leica, the first camera to truly allow high quality photography on the fly. Previously, cameras were tethered to tripods, or bulky and obvious. Bring up a one of those big, boxy Graflexs, and people ducked or fled the scene. Bring up a Leica and no one notices, not even when it makes its muffled "click." Digital cameras are often even smaller than the Leica and make no sound at all.
These models in a London store window seemed quite willing to be photographed. Nature
Nature photography is perhaps one of the most difficult kinds of photography. Subjects are elusive; one reason why so many "nature" photographs are taken in zoos and preserves. There it's like shooting fish in a barrel. However, if you do it au natural, nature photography joyfully merges a love of the outdoors with a love of making images. If no good shots appear, you've still had a nice walk.
These big-horned sheep are in the wilds of the London Zoo. Travel
One the first and most lasting applications of photography has been to bring distant worlds home to viewers. Digital photography now makes it possible to put all of your images on the Web and bore the entire world instead of just your friends and family. (I am probably the only photographer who fell asleep while showing his own slides.)
Stonehenge sits alone on England's Salisbury Plain looking much like it must have to those who built it thousands of years ago. Journalism
Reporters and news organizations such as the Associated Press have adopted digital cameras because the photos can be immediately transmitted from the site where they're taken over telephone lines or even a wireless connection. And once received, they are ready to use, no lab processing is required. A photo of the winning touchdown at a Super Bowl game can appear in a paper across the country within minutes. The low-resolution of digital cameras (compared to silver-based film) doesn’t matter because newspaper printing is also low-resolution. Good sites on digital photojournalism are Rob Galbraith's and Dirck Halstead's.
A rescue helicopter approaches the cliffs of Dover, England and rescues a man stranded by the incoming tide. Multimedia
Some big users of digital images are multimedia developers. Since multimedia is always displayed on a computer screen, or projected from it, digital images are a necessary ingredient. Whether originally taken with a digital camera or with a film camera and then scanned, the final image has to be in a digital format.
The PACE program was produced by Kim Foley to accompany a college computer text written by herself, Kunal Sen, Cathy Morin and Dennis Curtin. The text and program are published by Irwin/McGraw-Hill. Law Enforcement
Wegee may not have put down his flash-bulb equipped Grapflex for a digital camera, but law enforcement agencies sure have. Like others, they are attracted to the speed of processing and the ability to easily enhance images and distribute them on-line.
Graphic Illustration
Posters, books, magazines, journals, reports, and other kinds of other documents are illustrated with photographs and other images. Since these publications are increasingly desktop published, digital photos are just another part of the stew.
Rick Ashley took a digital photograph of the drummer Mohammed Camara and merged it with some clip art to create a stunning poster used to announce classes and performances. Image courtesy of Rick Ashley. Insurance
If your house or office burns down, or blows or floats away, how do you prove you lost that velvet painting of Elvis? The best way is to photograph your belongings and store the image files on a disk. Then, hope you'll be able to open the images a decade from now when you need them and file formats and devices have changed (remember the 5 1/4-inch floppy?) To be on the safe side, display the images on the TV and tape them then store the tape in a safe place.
This historic old sign hangs on our kitchen wall. God forbid, the house burns down, you can now make a claim for it since you have its picture. Copying
It's often necessary to make photographic copies of documents and objects. For example, a museum might want an illustrated inventory of everything in its possession. Digital cameras are ideal for this application.
Here an old advertisement for camera lenses has been copied. Lots of us have old family photographs that have been tossed in drawers and not well cared for over the years. As our families grow and spread out, it’s harder and harder to organize and share these images that recall so much. However having them scanned, or even just photographing them with a digital camera, makes them easy to insert into documents or e-mail.
Catalog Photography
Some of the early adopters of high-end digital cameras were photographers doing studio photographs for catalogs and other publications. They were able to quickly adopt these cameras for a variety of reasons. To begin with, objects such as bird houses or dinner plates don’t move. This makes it possible to get the long exposures required by some high-resolution cameras that take three exposures to get a full color image. Another reason is that the images are usually reproduced small enough so their faults don't show. Finally, the production houses that prepare the catalogs prefer to receive digital images so they can avoid the time and cost of scanning them.
This studio image was taken with Sound Vision's CMOS-PRO—the first CMOS digital camera specifically designed for the graphic arts professional. Image courtesy of Sound Vision Inc. Commercial Photography
Commercial photographers were amongst the first to adopt digital photography. Using expensive digital backs to large format cameras, these photographers are turning out images that rival those from film-based cameras.
Mike Berceanu shot this image on the Agfa StudioCam scanning digital camera. Courtesy of Mike Berceanu. Composite Imaging
Once images are in digital form, you can start to take pieces from various images and paste them into other images. These composite images can be tame or wild. In fact, compositing is done so often on television and in print advertisement that we're growing used to it.
Here the moon has been cut out of one image and pasted into another. You can't even tell the image has been altered. Print Publishing
Once images are in a digital format, you can include them in desktop published documents created with programs such as Microsoft Word, PageMaker, or QuarkXPress.
Images have been placed in a PageMaker document to prepare them for publishing. Web Publishing
Anyone who is taking photographs for the Web prefers digital cameras because the images are ready to post as soon as they are taken. The images don’t have to be first processed and then scanned as film has to be. This saves both time and money. Since most screens display only low-resolution images, the low-resolution of some cameras is no drawback. In fact, higher resolution images would be too big to post on most Web sites and would have to be reduced anyway.
The author of this site has a number of Web sites all well illustrated with digital images. The site shown here is one for kids on bulldozers and other construction equipment. If you click the link to check it out, please come back. Badges, Buttons, and Business Cards
Once the almost exclusive domain of Polaroid instant cameras, photos for IDs are increasingly taken in digital form. Once captured, they can be immediately printed right on the ID cards, making counterfeiting more difficult.You can also use the images to create buttons or illustrated business cards.
Fargo printers are used to make full-color ID cards complete with photographs. Courtesy of Fargo. Newsletters
Newsletters from companies and organizations are often full of images. Employees and members are honored when promoted, retired, or when they reach some milestone, and events are documented. As the publishing process has become digital and moved to the desktop, so have the photographs used to illustrate these newsletters.
Science
Digital photography is ideal for many scientific applications. Here a special digital camera has captured the spectral reflectance properties of plants so their status can be determined. Using photographs such as these, farmers are better able to manage their crops.
Digital cameras can also be used for special purposes. Here's an image taken with the Dycam ADC camera. And who ever said there wasn't art in science? I'd love to see what creative photographers could do with this camera. Courtesy of Dycam. Astronomy
Digital image sensors have been used in astronomy for years. They are now widely used in place of film, even on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the "Cat's Eye Nebula." Hubble reveals surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual shock-induced knots of gas. Estimated to be 1,000 years old, the nebula is a visual "fossil record" of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star. This image was created with support to Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., from NASA contract NAS5-26555 and is reproduced with permission from AURA/STScI. Space Exploration
When you fly a camera through space or land it on another planet, getting film back to Earth is a big problem. The solution, of course, is to use a digital camera and send the image back digitally by radio transmission. That’s exactly what was done on the Mars Rover mission where a small vehicle crawled across the surface of the planet sending back images—some of them in stereo.
Full view of the Earth, taken by GOES-8 (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) on 2 September 1994 at 18:00 UT. Courtesy of Public Use of Remote Data. Microscopy
It’s common practice to take videos or photographs of what’s revealed by a microscope. One of the masters of this was Roman Vishniac who was a true scientific artists. Digital cameras are ideal for this situation because the images can be immediately displayed.
Normal human bone captured through a Nikon microscope with SoundVision's CMOS-PRO. Image courtesy of Sound Vision, Inc. Fine Art
Fine art photography is a broad category that has included everything from the amazing prints of Ansel Adams to fuzzy prints from a pinhole camera. It’s not at all surprising that digital cameras have become part of the hardware repertoire that artists work with. Long before Jerry Uelsmann was making montages, this form of photography was going on. Here is a 1905 image by Adelaide Hanscom that has many of the features we see in manipulated digital art.
Adalaide Hanscom did an entire series of manipulated images to illustrate a 1905 edition of the Rubiyat. Real Estate
Realtors are big consumers of photography. Exterior shots are taken for newspaper ads and interior shots for brochures and Web sites. The ease and immediacy of digital cameras makes them widely used in this field.
A typical interior view such as those taken for real estate brochures. Fun
Photographs don't always have to be put to work. Most are really just for enjoyment. Capturing memories and strange sights are just a few such uses.
Peggy Curtin took this photo of a miniature St. Paul's Cathedral while leading a tour of Prince Edward Island in Canada. Toys
With the recent development of low-cost image sensors that are used in cameras, companies are developing more products that include vision. Cameras can now go into products in which they were previously too expensive or bulky.
Nintendo offers a black and white camera that attaches to a Game Boy and a paint program you can use to manipulate the images—even stitch together panoramas from a series of shots. You can then use and accompanying printer to print the images on stickers.
. The Game Boy camera lens rotates 360 degrees so you can take self portraits. Courtesy of Nintendo The Barbie Photo Designer Digital Camera brings low-cost digital imaging to kids. Courtesy of Mattel Media.
