Infinite Megapixels Digital Photography Presents a Whole

Infinite Megapixels

Digital photography presents a whole new world of opportunities for casual and professional photographers alike. Probably the most significant contribution of digital photography is the ability to change pictures at any stage. The act of taking a digital picture itself is akin to first mixing the paints on a palette before actually applying brush to canvas. Taking the picture is only a jumping off point. Digital cameras convert a scene from humanity into countless zeros and ones which best approximate that reality. We as photographers or simple beneficiaries of the digital photograph may then take the zeros and ones and add or subtract countless other zeros and ones.

In other words, we may modify the picture as we choose. We may invert the colors, touch up areas of dullness, covert the photograph into a black and white sketch and even put the photo in an impressionist painting style. We are only limited by our software program and our imagination.

Digital pictures are also eminently shareable. Once a picture is taken, it can be sent immediately (if one has a cellular internet connection) from the site of the photo to anyone in the world. This is a visual power that we have never had before this technology. The power to share ideas has finally taken on a visual angle, and with each passing year, the communication technology improves such that we are truly able to use this function of digital photography in every day business and pleasure. One can easily envision a real estate broker, for instance, doing the legwork on buying a new home for a busy prospective home buyer. The real estate agent visits a home, takes a picture of it and emails it to the buyer. She can immediately ask the agent to investigate further or move onto the next home based on that transferred visual image.

This ability to share changes the photographer's perspective and goals while taking pictures as well. Conventional photographers take pictures for themselves as memories of events and depictions of scenes. Often, the conventional photographer will only take into account what he or she wants to see in the picture. The digital photographer, though, takes pictures with a view to sharing: "What would my audience want to see?" The art of taking digital pictures begins to approximate the art of taking moving pictures with the purpose of making a film. This lends a whole new creative angle to digital photography.

Conventional photography eliminates the middle man. There are no zeros and ones, just light and color. Conventional photographs are truer to nature; regardless of how many megapixels a digital camera may have (megapixels measure the intricacy and clarity of a digital camera), the megapixels dead-end asymptotically at reality: in other words, digital technology will never duplicate conventional photography's depiction of reality, even though it may get awfully close as technology improves.

As a result, the purists will probably continue to use conventional photography no matter how many advantages digital photography poses. Also, conventional photographs are easier to print. Digital photographs require an expensive color photo printer, but even then, to get the best quality print out of a digital photo, one needs to send the file to a professional printer who may charge upwards of ten dollars a print. Conventional photographs may be developed in a dark room with the correct chemicals.

But the most striking advantage of conventional photography over digital photography is the sense of humanness about it. Conventional photography, as we discussed earlier, eliminates the computer's efforts to mitigate humanity. Roland Barthes, in his "Camera Lucida," discusses his attempts to find the perfect photo of his dead mother in the second part of the work, and his writing and his search are so poignant and human. We identify with Barthes and we are warmed by the fact that a man with such an imposing intellect and understanding can be brought to his sentimental knees by even the prospect that a perfect photograph exists of his mother. We could never imagine the same gut human reaction to a digital photograph. We are human, and therefore we are analog: we have no computers within us, and so to best represent humanity, computers cannot play a role.

But that is our view today. Surely writers in previous decades claimed that they could never envision themselves creating their art on computers; the manual nature of a typewriter was the only way to convey their thoughts. And of course, even before them, writers insisted that they could never use the new-fangled typewriter because it seemed so mechanical: writing for them was dipping a pen in ink and opening up their minds to the paper. All that has changed, and perhaps our attitude towards digital photography's dehumanization will change as well. We can only wait and see.