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© 2005 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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IS IS RARE IN OUR CULTURE that we are able to identify a phenomenon as it is taking place, instead of just in retrospect. Mobile phones were mostly a curiosity until they, almost overnight, became commonplace. Same with the iPod. Same with most fashion statements. Same with most everything.
Digital photography is different. Its rise has not been meteoric, but rather sure and steady. And month by month, season by season, holiday by holiday, more and more households have bought into it. Today, most of us view a digital camera as novel but necessary, and only a matter of time before we buy our first one or our next one. It is happening as we watch.
And this could not be a better time to watch, with models becoming better and cheaper on a monthly basis, and print services almost as accessible as service stations for your autos.
Unless you have been living under a rock since 1996, you are familiar with the persistent virtues of going digital with your photos:
IT’S WAY CHEAPER: Even though the initial buy-in is a bit higher, your cost for consumables drops through the floor. You will never buy film again, storing photos on media that you can buy online from $25. Equal to the point, you will never pay for a print of a bad photo.
YOU TAKE BETTER PHOTOS: When it costs you nothing to push the shutter, you do it more often. You know the story about a thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand typewriters and the work of Shakespeare being the result? Dumb luck also prevails over digital photography, as any of us hacks and amateurs can take a decent photo of a scene when we give ourselves a dozen chances.
YOU BECOME A BETTER PHOTOGRAPHER: As a decent commercial-grade photographer, I have been taking photos for over two decades. But I never really developed a feel for composition or a solid understanding of the science of photography until five years ago. No matter how many notes I took, I just could not connect what I did five days ago with what I was looking at when the film came back from the lab.
But the immediacy of digital is the best photography teacher you could ever hope for. You see in five seconds, not five days, what happens if you move your subject off-center, how it looks to shift the light source to another angle, how depth of field changes when you change the lens aperture, how shutter speed affects the entire energy flow of a scene that involves motion.
YOUR SUBJECTS BECOME BETTER MODELS: An unexpected benefit of the digital age is a result of the attention span of the people you photograph. It used to be easy to sit for a photo—smile broadly through one or two shots and they would be done. Now, it is commonplace for a photo to be more like a photo session, with multiple photos taken from several angles. Most people can’t paste a smile for that long and some will even begin to ignore the photographer. And that is when the really good photos are taken. After the requisite pasted-on-smile shots, when they tire of having their photo taken, expect the best results.
Perhaps the most important development in digital photography is the explosion of outlets that will print your images. We stopped counting at 250 the number of online services available (our favorite is the Kodak Picture Center), and today you can take your little compact flash card or jump drive to Rite-Aid, Longs, Walgreens, Walmart, Costco...and dozens others.
This is significant because the real price savings occur not from your printing photos yourself, but from your sending them out. It is wonderful to be able to make your own prints, no doubt, and you can pick up a good photo printer for next to nothing (or literally nothing if you watch for the incentives offered by Dell, Best Buy, and the other big retailers). But you’ll get eaten alive by the cost of the ink and paper if you use your own printer exclusively. You cannot beat the estimated 35 cents you’ll pay for a single 4x6 print (and as low as 15 cents for quantity or promotional offers).
Skeptics look at the ritual of sending digital images out and awaiting the arrival of prints as being nothing different than the tedium they were hoping to escape with film processing. But there is one huge difference: With digital, you only order prints of the good images, not all of them. You already know if you’ve taken a winner, and chances are good that you have already emailed it to friends and loved ones, uploaded it to a website, and organized it in your online photo album.
The biggest risk with digital photography is that you will go overboard and buy more camera than you need and more cameras than you need.
What a fantastic problem to have!
Today’s buy-in for a good all-purpose digital camera is barely $250. The top-of-the-line model that cost $800 two years ago can be found for about $350 today, and digital versions of professional-style single lens reflex models (SLRs, “real” cameras with detachable lenses) are showing up with regularity under $1,000. We are watching closely the emergence of the “super-zoom” category—cameras that boast 10x and 12x optical zoom ranges. This is the equivalent of a 35 to 400mm zoom lens, all in a standard camera chassis.
These cameras feature the good kind of zoom (optical zoom, not worthless “digital zoom” that is a marketeer’s dream and consumer’s nightmare) along with special image stabilization technology to help against camera shake. As those prices dip into the mid-$400s, we expect them to be gobbled up by vacationers who want to be able to shoot close-ups and landscapes without having to add or swap lenses.
And then there is the holy grail of digital photography for those adept with image-editing software: the ability to fix, modify, and enhance a photo. We wish that everyone started practicing with an image editor, if for no other reason than to eliminate for good the obnoxious anti-red-eye flash options that turn cameras into migraine-creation machines.
Beyond that, of course, is a treasure trove of opportunity to alter reality for the better, and few have it better than users of Corel software. For one low buy-in, you get graphic-drawing and image-editing applications with CorelDraw, or an incredibly-priced image editor in Paint Shop Pro.
Similarly, creative PowerPoint users will love being able to effortlessly incorporate their own photos into presentations, be it for business or for pleasure—refine a sales pitch that was formerly a collection of boring bullet slides or creating a family keepsake of images, set to music.
We look upon the emergence of mobile phones with built-in cameras with fear, loathing, and blatant snobbery. First off, the cameras are pathetic little toys, capable of producing images no better than first-generation cameras from 1996. Those who form their first impression of digital photography from what they see on their phones are doomed to harbor misconceptions for years.
Worse is the specter of what might happen to the mobile phone industry if camera phones become more common. There are numerous institutions and destinations at which photography is prohibited (court houses, military bases, many airports, museums) and other places where it is morally reprehensible, such as restrooms and locker rooms. If authorities cannot tell the difference between a mobile phone and a camera, they may have no choice but to prohibit them all. Madison Avenue might want to think twice about creating commercials that show someone taking a photo and immediately sending it out via email, all with the same device. They might be killing their golden goose.
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All in all, this is a grand time to be a photographer and a digital designer, with technology ready to explode onto the scene, competition among manufacturers driving prices down, and entries forming at so many different price points.
Watch for 2005 to be a banner year for the revolution that we are watching unfold right now.
Next Month: For Whom the Bell Does Not Toll—why digital photography is NOT for everyone...
To discuss this article or digital photography in general, please head to our Forum.
Copyright 2005, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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