“As a photographer who honed his craft in film, Scott Mead was reluctant to go digital. Everyone was,” Les Shu reports for Digital Trends. “‘Early digital cameras were 3 to maybe 6 megapixels, and that didn’t really translate into the availability to have very large images,”’ Mead said. “’Whereas when you’re shooting slides, hey, it’s as big as your enlarger can go, then that’s how big you can actually print.'”
“But then he tried digital, and discovered firsthand how it would revolutionize his work,” Shu reports. “Mead was working as a photographer for the automotive website Edmunds.com, in the late ’90s, and he had purchased one of the first digital Nikon Coolpix cameras to cover the Los Angeles Auto Show.”
Shu reports, “‘That was the eye opener –- the speed that we can get is phenomenal.’ More experiences would soon follow that convinced him to fully embrace digital photography.”
“Ten years later reveals a completely different story — an industry that rewrote its own rules, ate itself, and reinvented itself anew,” Shu reports. “What is taking its place is an even more democratic world of imagery, where cameras are all around us, selfies rule, and photography is more vibrant than ever. And it’s all thanks to Steve Jobs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Thanks, Steve!
Digital has changed the game! Software can do in seconds what previously took hours. No messy, smelly chemicals, no temperature control, working in the dark, worry about accidental light exposure ruining work. The digital darkroom is computer, software, and printer. 🖖😀⌚️
I had that same Nikon Coolpix camera and remember taking it on to a TV show I was working on and everyone saw it’s usefulness and potential. Would never go back (duh). Now I use a Canon 60D 18mpx camera on a homemade downshooter stand shooting old slides and color/B&W negatives of any size against a cool LED flat light screen and the results are fabulous. Who needs expensive scanners anymore? Plus the exposure time hovers around 1/2 second each as opposed to a couple minutes with a scanner – and the results aren’t as good with a scanner. Digital rocks. Photoshop manipulation off RAW’s is amazing. (When scan/shooting the RAW keeps all that lovely information off film negatives as well.)
That is all so very true but what I would love to be able to use is a DSLR that doesn’t have all the software bells and whistles for editing etc. I’m not editing in camera when I have decent software on my Mac.
Oh and I want to be able to turn off all the stupid autofocus functions and use stop down metering.
I want a real aperture ring not some stupid mode selection with a thumbwheel.
I want high quality optics – the current stuff from Nikon is really quite poor. I want to go back to Carl Zeiss optics.