Digital Photography

Digital photography has become the standard today. Most cameras sold today are digital.
Analog photography is on the way to disappearance except in a few niche applications.
But what exactly is digital photography? In what ways is it better than analog
photography? How did it earn its place of preeminence?
 
All photography captures an image by focusing light reflected from something in the
world through a lens and recording that image in a medium. With old-fashioned analog
photography, the medium was a film with light-sensitive chemicals that darkened or
changed color when struck by light. The film was then processed in a darkroom using
various chemicals that caused the image to appear in a “negative” – with the colors
reversed – and then light was beamed through the film onto light-sensitive paper which
was also exposed to chemicals to produce a “print.” The process was time-consuming and
included many points where mistakes were possible. It was expensive in terms of
materials and labor both, but until the advent of digital photography, it was the only way
that photographs could be taken, developed, and preserved.
 
Instead of this analog process, digital photography focuses the light from the lens onto an
array of electronic light sensors hooked up to a computer processing chip to create a
digital image and store it in digital memory. The stored image can be seen immediately on
the camera’s screen, transmitted to other devices for storage or further processing, and
digitally published on the Internet.
 

The advantages of digital over analog photography are enormous. There’s no danger of
losing photographs by accidentally exposing film, or of making a mistake in the
development process that ruins the photo forever. You can see the results of your efforts
immediately, and know if you need to retake a shot, as opposed to waiting hours or days
before the results are available. There’s no delay while the photos are processed; they can
be checked at once. That means you don’t have to take as many shots in order to be
reasonably sure of a good one, and in addition each photo you take costs essentially
nothing – no film, no development chemicals, no printing paper or slide materials. Digital
photography saves both time and money by making the process more efficient and less
wasteful.
 
You can make perfect copies of a digital photograph, whereas copies of analog
photographs lose fidelity the more times copies of copies are made. Digital photographs
are taken in exactly the format you will need for digital publication or for using the photos
in a graphic design program. There’s no guesswork involved in moving from one medium
to another, no wondering how a photo that looks great in an eight by ten glossy will appear
when rendered into newsprint.