Digital photography has gone through some amazing changes since I wrote the first edition of this book. At that time, I was floored by the introduction of the original Canon Digital Rebel, a 6-megapixel single lens reflex (SLR) camera available for less than $1000. That Digital Rebel, I predicted, would be seen as the harbinger of a significant digital photography revolution.
After all, back in 2003, glorified point-and-shoot digital cameras with fixed lenses and optical viewfinders could cost more than $1,000. Canon's innovation caused the entire industry to regroup. Such a low price point suddenly made digital photography more attractive to the millions of serious photographers who would settle for nothing less than an SLR, but who couldn't afford the $2,000 tariff on even the least expensive models. Second, the presence of a $1,000 dSLR on the market meant that everyone else's non-SLR models became much less attractive at that price. Vendors began dropping prices, packing their new cameras with more features, and digital photography immediately became even more of a booming mainstream consumer trend than ever before.
Indeed, while I wouldn't have been foolish enough to predict the "death" of film only a few years ago, that's in fact what has effectively happened. Since the first edition of this book came out, Kodak has announced that it has ceased researching future improvements in film, and discontinued its Advanced Photo System cameras entirely. The film quality benchmark Kodachrome, once worthy of a hit song by Paul Simon, can today be processed in only a dwindling number of labs. Film giants Agfa and Ilford are insolvent, digital cameras of all classes outsell film cameras, and a growing number of professionals are using high-end digital cameras from Canon, Nikon, Mamiya, and Hasselblad. We've seen the introduction of the last professional Nikon film camera, and that's viable only because its removable back probably will be easily swappable for a digital back sometime down the road.
Photographers, even those of us who cut our teeth on Tri-X Pan and Microdol-X are today living in a digital age. There's no going back. That original Digital Rebel has already been replaced by an improved Digital Rebel XT. New digital SLRs from Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, and Olympus are clustered around the $1000 price point and far below. Even more important for photo enthusiasts are the new non-SLR models at even cheaper prices that are still bedecked with 7- to 8-megapixel (and higher) sensors, longer zooms, and sophisticated features. Serious photographers today can get in on the ground floor for $500 or less.
So, traditionalist film photographers have transformed themselves, one after another, into computer nerds. It's not hard to understand their motivation: Successful photographers have an unusual combination of artistic eye, dedication to a demanding craft, a huckster's knack for self-promotion, more than a smattering of good business sense, and an affinity for the mechanical and electronic gadgetry that make up our cameras and darkroom equipment. Digital photography is, on one level, just another outrageously powerful kind of photo gadget. If you liked autofocus, can't live without automatic bracketing, and think databacks are cool, you'll love digital imaging.
In fact, if you're an avid photographer, your interest in digital photography probably predates practical digital photography itself, because affordable electronic models that could compete with traditional film cameras have been available only since the beginning of this millennium. This is one technology in which all of us are getting in on the ground floor. Some younger photographers have never used anything else.
But for veteran photographers who have longed for decades for the kind of capabilities that digital photography brings to the table, this is the best of all times to be taking pictures. You're probably the happiest clam on the beach as you watch technology finally catch up to your needs.
However, it's been a long and strange trip. Only a photographer can truly appreciate how weird it is that the ability to correct, retouch, edit, and manipulate digital pictures with a computer became common a full decade before the technology to originate images in digital form became practical for the average picture taker. How is it that we had Photoshop back in the 1990s, but had to wait for practical digital cameras until the 21st century? Certainly, the ability to edit conventional photographs within image editors like Photoshop (after the photos are duly scanned and digitized) is valuable whether digital cameras are widely used or not. But doesn't it make more sense to eliminate that intermediate step? Doesn't digital image editing cry out for digital photos? Figure 1.1 shows what the Photoshop interface looked like roughly 10 years ago on a Macintosh Quadra 650. Figure 1.2 shows how far we've come, with a shot of the latest version running on a Pentium-powered PC that operates roughly 80 times faster.
Yet, while Photoshop is blossoming into its ninth edition, Photoshop CS 2.0, and other popular image editors like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro gain in popularity, we're just now seeing affordable digital cameras that can truly do everything a serious photographer's film counterpart can handle. You're probably thinking "about time!" along with millions of other picture takers.
This book is going to delve a little deeper into digital photography than many of the books you might have read. Unlike most of the other books on the shelf, this is a photographers' guide, designed to leverage the things you already know about photography as you spread your wings in the digital realm. This first chapter is intended to be an overview of digital photography and technology—a glimpse from 50,000 feet that provides you with some perspective on where we are, where we're going, and how we got here.
This chapter, as well as this entire book, is intended for serious photographers at all levels of the digital realm, and covers both digital SLRs as well as non-SLR models, including point-and-shoot cameras and those using electronic viewfinders. If your interests lie with digital SLRs, I hope you'll check out my companion volume, Mastering Digital SLR Photography, also from Thomson/Course Technology, which goes into a lot more detail about the things dSLR users need to know.
You might not have seen the background information I'm going to present in the digital camera books you've read—probably because the authors weren't photographers. A computer guru who understands microprocessors and software applications might have no clue as to what makes a great image. However, if you're serious about photography, you know that simple knowledge of the mechanics of taking pictures isn't enough. You must also have the right tools, know how they are best applied, and understand how to use them. That's what you'll be gleaning from this book.
You'll learn exactly how digital frees us to do things with images that could only be accomplished by tedious work and experimentation with conventional tools. Photographers who have darkroom experience might have combined images with double exposures, sandwiched two slides together, cross-processed chromes in color-negative developing solutions, or pushed super-fast films to ridiculous exposure indexes to get a particular effect. These techniques usually involve more error than trial when you're working with conventional films. With a digital camera, you can instantly reshoot a picture until you get the results you want. The computer—both the one on your desktop and the one built into your camera—gives you the freedom to tweak, re-tweak, and start over if the final results don't please you. Indeed, there is a whole litany of tricks that couldn't be done at all before the introduction of digital imaging.
Individual image components can be isolated, combined with other components, reversed, rebalanced, or removed entirely with barely a trace of what has been done remaining for the casual eye to detect. We can relocate the Great Pyramid of Egypt, show Elvis shaking hands with aliens from space, or remove an intrusive mother-in-law from a bridal portrait.
More than anything else, digital photography is fun. Most of us, even though we're capable of doing good work with simple equipment, don't hesitate to take advantage of all the tools that are available. So, it was only a matter of time before digital imaging started seducing photographers who previously had no intention of using computers. As cameras became more electronic and computerized, it was a logical next step to incorporate scanned images, electronic retouching, and eventually digitally originated images into the average photographer's repertoire. That's why so many perfectly good photographers have found it necessary to become computer nerds.
After all, back in 2003, glorified point-and-shoot digital cameras with fixed lenses and optical viewfinders could cost more than $1,000. Canon's innovation caused the entire industry to regroup. Such a low price point suddenly made digital photography more attractive to the millions of serious photographers who would settle for nothing less than an SLR, but who couldn't afford the $2,000 tariff on even the least expensive models. Second, the presence of a $1,000 dSLR on the market meant that everyone else's non-SLR models became much less attractive at that price. Vendors began dropping prices, packing their new cameras with more features, and digital photography immediately became even more of a booming mainstream consumer trend than ever before.
Indeed, while I wouldn't have been foolish enough to predict the "death" of film only a few years ago, that's in fact what has effectively happened. Since the first edition of this book came out, Kodak has announced that it has ceased researching future improvements in film, and discontinued its Advanced Photo System cameras entirely. The film quality benchmark Kodachrome, once worthy of a hit song by Paul Simon, can today be processed in only a dwindling number of labs. Film giants Agfa and Ilford are insolvent, digital cameras of all classes outsell film cameras, and a growing number of professionals are using high-end digital cameras from Canon, Nikon, Mamiya, and Hasselblad. We've seen the introduction of the last professional Nikon film camera, and that's viable only because its removable back probably will be easily swappable for a digital back sometime down the road.
Photographers, even those of us who cut our teeth on Tri-X Pan and Microdol-X are today living in a digital age. There's no going back. That original Digital Rebel has already been replaced by an improved Digital Rebel XT. New digital SLRs from Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, and Olympus are clustered around the $1000 price point and far below. Even more important for photo enthusiasts are the new non-SLR models at even cheaper prices that are still bedecked with 7- to 8-megapixel (and higher) sensors, longer zooms, and sophisticated features. Serious photographers today can get in on the ground floor for $500 or less.
So, traditionalist film photographers have transformed themselves, one after another, into computer nerds. It's not hard to understand their motivation: Successful photographers have an unusual combination of artistic eye, dedication to a demanding craft, a huckster's knack for self-promotion, more than a smattering of good business sense, and an affinity for the mechanical and electronic gadgetry that make up our cameras and darkroom equipment. Digital photography is, on one level, just another outrageously powerful kind of photo gadget. If you liked autofocus, can't live without automatic bracketing, and think databacks are cool, you'll love digital imaging.
In fact, if you're an avid photographer, your interest in digital photography probably predates practical digital photography itself, because affordable electronic models that could compete with traditional film cameras have been available only since the beginning of this millennium. This is one technology in which all of us are getting in on the ground floor. Some younger photographers have never used anything else.
But for veteran photographers who have longed for decades for the kind of capabilities that digital photography brings to the table, this is the best of all times to be taking pictures. You're probably the happiest clam on the beach as you watch technology finally catch up to your needs.
However, it's been a long and strange trip. Only a photographer can truly appreciate how weird it is that the ability to correct, retouch, edit, and manipulate digital pictures with a computer became common a full decade before the technology to originate images in digital form became practical for the average picture taker. How is it that we had Photoshop back in the 1990s, but had to wait for practical digital cameras until the 21st century? Certainly, the ability to edit conventional photographs within image editors like Photoshop (after the photos are duly scanned and digitized) is valuable whether digital cameras are widely used or not. But doesn't it make more sense to eliminate that intermediate step? Doesn't digital image editing cry out for digital photos? Figure 1.1 shows what the Photoshop interface looked like roughly 10 years ago on a Macintosh Quadra 650. Figure 1.2 shows how far we've come, with a shot of the latest version running on a Pentium-powered PC that operates roughly 80 times faster.
Figure 1.1. This version of Photoshop was introduced even before practical digital cameras were available.
Figure 1.2. Today, the latest version of Photoshop CS 2.0 is ready for anything your digital camera can produce.
Yet, while Photoshop is blossoming into its ninth edition, Photoshop CS 2.0, and other popular image editors like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro gain in popularity, we're just now seeing affordable digital cameras that can truly do everything a serious photographer's film counterpart can handle. You're probably thinking "about time!" along with millions of other picture takers.
This book is going to delve a little deeper into digital photography than many of the books you might have read. Unlike most of the other books on the shelf, this is a photographers' guide, designed to leverage the things you already know about photography as you spread your wings in the digital realm. This first chapter is intended to be an overview of digital photography and technology—a glimpse from 50,000 feet that provides you with some perspective on where we are, where we're going, and how we got here.
This chapter, as well as this entire book, is intended for serious photographers at all levels of the digital realm, and covers both digital SLRs as well as non-SLR models, including point-and-shoot cameras and those using electronic viewfinders. If your interests lie with digital SLRs, I hope you'll check out my companion volume, Mastering Digital SLR Photography, also from Thomson/Course Technology, which goes into a lot more detail about the things dSLR users need to know.
You might not have seen the background information I'm going to present in the digital camera books you've read—probably because the authors weren't photographers. A computer guru who understands microprocessors and software applications might have no clue as to what makes a great image. However, if you're serious about photography, you know that simple knowledge of the mechanics of taking pictures isn't enough. You must also have the right tools, know how they are best applied, and understand how to use them. That's what you'll be gleaning from this book.
You'll learn exactly how digital frees us to do things with images that could only be accomplished by tedious work and experimentation with conventional tools. Photographers who have darkroom experience might have combined images with double exposures, sandwiched two slides together, cross-processed chromes in color-negative developing solutions, or pushed super-fast films to ridiculous exposure indexes to get a particular effect. These techniques usually involve more error than trial when you're working with conventional films. With a digital camera, you can instantly reshoot a picture until you get the results you want. The computer—both the one on your desktop and the one built into your camera—gives you the freedom to tweak, re-tweak, and start over if the final results don't please you. Indeed, there is a whole litany of tricks that couldn't be done at all before the introduction of digital imaging.
Individual image components can be isolated, combined with other components, reversed, rebalanced, or removed entirely with barely a trace of what has been done remaining for the casual eye to detect. We can relocate the Great Pyramid of Egypt, show Elvis shaking hands with aliens from space, or remove an intrusive mother-in-law from a bridal portrait.
More than anything else, digital photography is fun. Most of us, even though we're capable of doing good work with simple equipment, don't hesitate to take advantage of all the tools that are available. So, it was only a matter of time before digital imaging started seducing photographers who previously had no intention of using computers. As cameras became more electronic and computerized, it was a logical next step to incorporate scanned images, electronic retouching, and eventually digitally originated images into the average photographer's repertoire. That's why so many perfectly good photographers have found it necessary to become computer nerds.
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