Digital Photography

1. What is the difference between analog photography and digital photography?

digital photography is about a set of numbers scored in computer. therefore, it can be displayed on screen or used to create a print. Digital photography is also a complicated set of relationships among reality (the captured reality), data derived from that reality and the electronic processes of a computer. digital photography is encoded in the computer and then output to a screen or a printer as a bitmap with a set of binary digits. in short, digital photography is a process of creating, storing and manipulating numbers in a computer and then rendering them into visual images.

in traditional analog photography, photograph is created by a piece of film in camera exposed to light, then developed to produce a negative, which in turn is used to produce a print. it contains silver halide crystals or dye that are color and tone, a bitmap contains only zero and ones.


2. What use is digital technology to photographers?

digital technology facilitates photographers to edit on the body of work instantly without having to develop film and printing it out in advance for amendment. The liquid crystal display (LCD) shows the actual digital image created by the camera so that photographer can review the photographs that they have taken immediately and throw out those images they don't need or want. it dispenses the time of waiting of the photo in the darkroom. apart from the change of the tool, the computer programs also facilitates to manipulate images once they have been created by a digital camera. photographer used to make changes on a physical object. but for digital photography, the computer software helps to change the numbers that compose the photograph's bitmap. it offers photographers a greater degree of control over their work than before and it is easier and less toxic than traditional techniques. they can see the changes instantly on the screen where photographer see the result of the balance of the contrast or the color of an image.Finer tune can also be made. furthermore, changes are cheap to try. Also, many different versions of an image can be created too. in color photography, digital technology offers even more advantages because it gives the photographer control over saturation and contrast and the colors where that are impossible in the traditional darkroom.

3. Is photographic truth at an end? Has it every existed?
since the digital technology has appeared, photographers have higher possibility and ability to manipulate and amend on photograph they took than the traditional camera era. there is a tendency that the technology becomes more familiar and convenient to user, truth can therefore be changed and controlled. audience would become harder to distinguish what is true and false.
however, in my opinion, even the digital has not emerged, photograph can only reveal the part of the reality (the truth) because the camera limited audiences' view by the frame. the final photograph can only be regarded as representation of the reality.
in traditional photography, photographer can use their technology to change the photo for example, Lenin had purged the people by moving out them on the photo. therefore, this is not about the digital technology to make the photographic truth at an end. instead, photography itself has limited the scope of truth.