How Digital Photography Works

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

Robert Capa

...I had only one plate holder with one unexposed

plate. Could I catch what I saw and felt? I released

the shutter. If I had captured what I wanted, the

photograph would go far beyond any of my

previous prints. It would be a picture based on

related shapes and deepest human feeling—a step

in my own evolution, a spontaneous discovery.

Alfred Stieglitz

THEquotes at the top of this page represent not only the different attitudes of two accomplished photographers, it

also is emblematic of the change that photography is going through because of the development of digital cameras

and the digital darkroom.

For war photographer Robert Capa, a photograph is totally the product of one

single moment and a particular place. His most famous photograph, “Death of

a Loyalist Soldier, Spain, 1936,” shows a soldier on a rampart at the second

he has been struck by a bullet. He is bending back. His rifle is slipping from his

hand. A second earlier he was a fighter. A second from now, he will be

another body on the battlefield. But right now, he’s dying. It is a unique

moment, the type of moment that shaped the thinking of Capa and many of his

contemporary photographers—that a photo had a unique existence tied to par-

ticular coordinates of time and space.

Although Alfred Stieglitz was largely a product of the same deterministic attitude

toward photography, his words above reveal his suspicion that great photogra-

phers are not just those who happen to be in the right place and time when the makings of great photos are taking

place around them. His thoughts show a realization that the photographer makes an emotional and intellectual contri-

bution to the creation of a great photograph. But you also sense Stieglitz’s despair at the thought that he will only

have one chance to capture the image he conceives, and then the opportunity is forever lost.

Today, Stieglitz might be less pessimistic because few photographers now accept the notion that they are stuck with

whatever image they capture when they snap their shutters. In this chapter, you see what Stieglitz would have liked

to: how you’re only a few numbers away from improving that picture for an off-color hue here, a touch of red eye

there, or on the more drastic side, ridding family photos of irritating relatives entirely.

CHAPTER 9 HOW SOFTWARE CHANGES PIXELS BY THE NUMBERS^143

Robert Capa photo of a soldier at the
moment of his death.