digital photography

Over the past ten years , more and more photographers both professional and casual alike have slowly moved into digital photography . News and journalism photographers were the first to move to digital due to its simplicity and speed of processing compared to film . Consumers are now flocking to digital , even hastening the demise of film , especially the 35mm format . An entire new industry has arisen in digital photography both with old names in photography like Kodak , Canon and Nikon up to newcomers who notably came from the computer and electronics industries like Hewlett-Packard

, and Samsung . Even elite ' names in the camera industry have introduced digital products , from Leica to Hasselblad

The main difference between digital photography and film photography is the type of recording device used . Film photography exposes an emulsion that triggers chemical reactions when exposed to light . Digital photography on the other hand exposes a CCD sensor which translates an image into an array of picture elements or pixels . Each pixel is a number that represents image data like brightness , hue and saturation for a small part of the image . The rest of the camera , from the lens to the shutter operation to the focusing and bracketing mechanisms is for the most part unchanged from film to digital

The use of digital s to store pictures removes the intermediate physical medium to store the image . The photographer does not anymore hold a physical representation of the picture he or she took . Digital could seem ethereal or even unreal to someone used to holding and processing film . The electronic exposure of the CCD could appear to some as being unfaithful compared to the physical reactions that etch an image into a slide of film . To some , the lack of a tangible recorded media could be seen as a form of cheating . There is a perception that a long string of 1s and 0s (which is essentially what a digital is composed of ) is not as faithful to the image as a roll of film that was written with the actual light that came from the subject . Additionally there are those who point out that even on a technical level , digital cameras lack the technology to faithfully reproduce an image to the same degree as film

In the early days of digital , the faithfulness of digital photography was seriously in question . Computations show that to be able to have the same resolution as 35mm film , digital cameras should have at least 6 .3 million pixels or megapixels . This was impractical in the early days as cameras having 6 .3 megapixels were limited to the professionals and cost in the thousands of dollars . However that is not the case today . A majority of consumer level digital cameras already upwards of 6 .3 megapixels with the high end consumer cameras having 10 megapixels or more

There are still who say that even with the matching megapixel count that film still superior thanks to the higher dynamic range of film . To some degree...