The digital era of photography
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🎧 Listening to the Podcast on YouTube or iTunes.
Digital photography as we know it has only been around for about two decades. In truth, however, its origins go much deeper than that. The 1990s saw the first commercially available digital cameras, but the technology that we so often take for granted – with its unlimited storage space, live view displays and other conveniences – actually first came into being during the 1950s.
It all started with the first video tape recorders that were developed in 1952. These were the first devices to use something other than film (a coded signal on tape) as a recording medium. With a tape player, people could convert the code into a picture.
Then, in 1957, a man named Russell A. Kirsch took the idea of filmless imaging a step further. His technological breakthrough – a drum scanner that sensed the differences between light and darkness in an image – created the very first digital image. This image, a portrait of his son, Walden, was black and white and very small – only 176 pixels to a side. Even though it’s primitive by today’s standards,
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I was there when the first shots were fired in the Photographic Digital Revolution. There were no rifles 25 years ago on Martha’s Vineyard, but there were strange-looking prototype cameras that captured images with small sensors and saved them on floppy disks.
And in the beginning, as in most revolutions, there were few true believers.
The National Press Photographers Association’s first Electronic Photojournalism Workshop — it wasn’t called digital then — took place in the fall of 1989. I was a freelance photographer for The New York Times, in my early 30s, eager to get a good job in the newspaper industry. I attended the workshop looking for a better understanding of the future of editorial photography and any advantage that could give me a leg up on my competition.
I joined photographers, editors, designers and tech industry representatives for a week on the Vineyard, though it wasn’t exactly clear to me what an electronic photography future meant. There were prototype digital cameras, computers and a very early version of a new soft
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5 Digital Photography
Similar to an analog camera, a digital camera is activated by light. However, a digital camera electronically records the image as a computer file. Digital photography was invented in the 1950s, but digital cameras were not widely marketed until the 1990s. Digital cameras are ubiquitous today in smart phones, but smart phones are only a 21st century phenomenon. Like analog photography, developments are related to improvements in focal quality and shutter speed among other functions. And just as analog photography transformed the amount of images people had access to and the way they thought about and experienced the world around them, digital photography also transformed the way that people experience themselves and understand the visual world.
Review what you learned in the previous chapter, the Foundations of Photography.
What are some of the ways that analog photography changed the way that people saw and experienced the world?
Photography and New Media Art
As you learned in the previous chapter, Photography is connected to the elements of New Med
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