The photographic coverage of the July 7 London bombings was an unexpected aftershock for media professionals. The realisation that almost every image seen on television news and front pages was captured by amateurs sent shivers down the collective media spine.
It was confirmation, if any were needed, that digital photography had come of age. Thanks to sales exceeding $200-million a year worldwide, including camera phones, access to digital photography is all but universal among the urban population.
What is astonishing is to realise that the important changes — from nearly zero adoption to near-saturation of the market — took place in only five years. While the first patents for a filmless camera were filed in 1972, we had to wait until 1986 for the first digital camera system, the Canon RC-701.
It was aimed at press photographers but its $27 000 price tag was hardly an encouragement. The first consumer digital camera under $1 000 arrived in 1994: the Apple QuickTake had a fixed lens and took 640×480 pixels (similar to the quality of an average TV screen). It was apparent that, while it was fun to get a picture without the hassle of processing film, the price was too high for image quality that was, to put it kindly, dilapidated.
It was not digital cameras that blocked progress. As with any new technology, the environment had to be conducive. Digital photography needed computers with fast processors capable of dealing with large files: one image file can be bigger than a year’s worth of text documents. In the late 1990s, computers were being loaded with ever more memory, hard-disk capacity and extra software to encourage flagging sales.
Right time, right place.
Digital photography took off only when, at the turn of the millennium, every computer could comfortably handle image files. As the market grew, manufacturing costs dropped. The adoption of cost-saving measures such as sharing components (the imaging chip, image processors, liquid crystal display screens and minor optics) between camera models also helped to drive down prices.
The impact of digital photography on modern life is in part due to marketing. Aggressive competition between camera-makers has forced product cycles — the time between new models — to shorten. Replacement models are being announced almost before the previous camera has reached the market.
The arrival of each new model offering more features and more quality at lower prices means that consumers are the winners. And don’t they know it: half of all digital camera sales (not including camera phones) in the United States and Europe are to those who already own a digital camera.
The intense activity has fuelled a parallel growth in technological awareness: it is no longer remarkable when a grandmother asks her teenage grandson to explain the difference between optical and digital zoom. Retired schoolteachers shop for cameras with a checklist of specifications in a way they would never have done for film-based models.
The increased awareness of the technology together with wide access to digital photography has, in turn, thrown the industry into disarray. The headlines — such as major chain stores removing film cameras from its shelves, Kodak no longer making black-and-white printing paper and the near-extinction of household names such as Leica, Agfa and Polaroid — all signal the obvious changes.
The restructuring of the profession is more subtle, profound and distressing: experienced photographers are finding themselves marginalised, their darkroom skills discounted with a rapidity that makes the destruction of craft traditions by the industrial revolution appear snail-paced in comparison.
To join the digital world, these professionals not only have to abandon large investments in equipment and experience, they must retrain to use computers and imaging software. And as film-using professionals are supplanted by digital photographers, so their largely obsolete equipment can be bought for a song.
Working practices have changed. The industry has now dumped ultimate responsibility for image quality on the lap of photographers — amateur and professional alike. All the quality control processes formerly ensuring that you got good results when films were developed and printed now sit in your hands.
Not only is it your job to download your pictures, you must adjust or manipulate the image if you don’t like the results, before printing it out on your printer. And, if the results are not perfect, there is no one to blame but yourself.
After enjoying a brief respite from having to placate increasingly demanding customers, the industry awoke to the horrified realisation that no one makes prints any more. From the happy days of a print made for every image captured, it’s now one miserable print for every few hundred images.
This is particularly galling because we now take far more images than ever: stories of those who once exposed a roll of film per holiday but now return to find hundreds of images in their new digital camera are not rare. But we show the images on our computers using slideshow features of software such as iPhoto or PowerPoint; we attach image files to the e-mails we send home; we share our holiday snaps on picture-sharing websites.
For the professional, the honeymoon of sensual joy in reviewing pictures immediately and of not having to dash to the lab to get films processed has been replaced by a colder reality. The working day suddenly grew hours longer: with nightfall, we can’t put our feet up. No, we sit at the laptop downloading images, captioning and backing up. And, if we are press photographers, we then have to edit the day’s shoot before transmitting them.
Any attempt to gaze into the crystal ball will be obscured by the sheer number of images being taken. In 1998, 67-billion images were made worldwide. We know that because three billion rolls of film were sold. It is impossible to be accurate, but with a world population of digital cameras exceeding a third of a billion on top of millions of film-using cameras still in use, it is likely that more pictures are taken every year than in the previous 160 years of photography put together.
In addition to the other pollutions we have unleashed on ourselves, we may well have to thank digital photography for giving us image pollution. — Â