How Digital Photography Works

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the

inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor

suffering humanity than anything else that has ‘’cast up’’ in my time

or is like to—this art by which even the ‘’poor’’ can possess

themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones.

Jane Welsh Carlyle, in a letter to her husband Thomas, 1859

For half a century, photography has been the “art form” of the

untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than

others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera?

To the finger on the button? To the law of averages?

Gore Vidal

FORmost of the time that photography has been in existence, artistry or quality hasn’t been a consideration. For

most people, photographs were in the same category as singing dogs. We aren’t impressed because a dog sings

beautifully; we’re amazed that a dog sings at all. And so it has been with photographs of long departed or far dis-

tant friends and relatives. We haven’t required that their photographs be works of art or even that they be in perfect

focus and color. We were happy enough to have something by which to remember our loved ones or to tell us some-

thing about an ancestor we could never meet.

Why were we so undemanding? It’s not so much as Gore Vidal complains, that we are without talents beyond press-

ing buttons, that we are simply singing dogs. Our casual approach to photography comes, rather, from being

largely middle-class hounds—except for professional photographers and those amateur shutterbugs who were so

obsessed by photography that they would sell the family cow for a few rolls of Kodachrome.

The sheer expense of taking photos as an avocation has been prohibitive. Even second-tier cameras and lenses

amounted to thousands of dollars. Processing film and prints cost still more and demanded hours in smelly, dark

rooms. Just the price of film and prints from the drugstore stopped most people from shooting more than a couple of

dozen frames at a time, unless they had a second family cow handy.

Digital photography is already changing that. For less than the cost of an iPod, you can buy a digital camera with

features and optics that would have roused the jealousy of pros a decade ago. The cost of film and processing is no

longer a factor. You may take hundreds of pictures in a single afternoon, and if most are embarrassments, at least

they’re free embarrassments. Printing is still an expense, but only for the pictures that look good enough on an LCD

screen to warrant printing.

Does this mean we’re in for an explosion of new Arbuses, Avalons, Leibovitzs, Steichens, Cartier-Bressons, and other

talented photographers with names that are difficult to pluralize? Yes. Yes, it does. Think of all the people you know

who are now carrying decent cameras in their purses and pockets, who are willfully exposing themselves to the pho-

tography virus. Where enough dogs congregate to harmonize, a few are bound to sound...not so bad.

CHAPTER 8 HOW NEW TECH CHANGES PHOTOGRAPHY^119