How Digital Photography Evolved...

Looking at the current technology of digital photography, you can't imagine what it has gone through to become the beautiful art today. It was dated that photography started around 1600 (it was more than 400 years ago. Such amazing history if you ask me).

I have never seen how a camera looks like during the 1600 but I bet it can be bulky and difficult to carry. The oldest cameras I know are the one that I see movies where the photographer needs to hide himself under the black cloth and hold the flash up. When the photographer snaps the picture, it will give out loud sound with the blinding flash. Then, the subjects will rub their eyes because of the flash. I am not sure whether the camera does "blind" the subject at that time but it was funny to see the technology at that time.

To me, photography only started to be fun when Robert Eastman (founder of Kodak) started to promote handheld film camera to the consumer. At that time, there were no photograph processing centres like you see in the 1980. In order for you to see the pictures you have taken, you need to send the whole camera back to US, let the professionals process the film and re-load your camera with film then only you will get your pictures and camera back. The process might sound to be lengthy still it actually takes 3-4 weeks to get these things done. Looking at the technology at that time, you can say that is a fast service.

And as technology improve, you can buy the film and re-load the film yourself instead of sending your camera back to Kodak for processing. It was at around 1930 that Kodak developed Kodachrome color processing which color photography was made available to the consumers. During that time you can send your film to the photo processing center and get to see your pictures in 4 days to a week.

Then in 1980s, Fuji developed the world first disposable camera. With the presence of the disposable camera, you can buy a camera to take picture for a particular event. This has made photography more affordable to the consumer because they don't need to buy a camera.

When you buy the disposable camera, the film is already loaded in the camera. Then, just like a point and shoot camera, you just snap the pictures and send the whole camera for processing. And after 2-4 days, you can share the pictures with your friends and family.

However, it doesn't take long for Fuji to introduce the first truly digital camera in 1988. By using complimentary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) or charge coupled device (CCD) as image sensor, you can now look at your pictures immediately on the LCD screen. If you don't like what you have taken, you can just delete the picture and take a brand new one knowing that you won't be wasting any film.

And ever since the introduction of digital camera, film cameras started to meet their downfall. The numbers of picture developing center has reduced tremendously over the years. If you look at the development of digital photography properly, it only took 20 years for it to become what it is today (I still have my Fuji film camera with me and it still looks good) and you can still see that digital photography is evolving everyday. New equipments are being developed, new techniques are being introduced and careers that you never heard of are being built with digital photography.

As how I see it, there are still a lot of rooms for digital photography to grow. You will have cheaper yet more powerful digital camera in the future. Not to mention the possibility of printing the pictures yourself with cheaper printer and ink. I do hope that printer developers can build a printer that can print photos and documents together. Plus, in the future, more and more players will start to compete in the photo editing software market. When that happens, you and I will be enjoying more affordable and user friendly software. :-)

Have fun photographing,

Michael Wong. :-)

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