Dennis Glennon's PHOTO TIPS
Digital Photography for The Photo Hobbyist
The Digital Camera
For a long time, many professional photographers resisted switching to digital equipment, myself included. Traditional photography (using film to capture one's image on) requires skill as well as an artistic eye if one wants outstanding photographs. There is no room for mistakes. Bad shots get developed along with the good ones and the bad ones are simply tossed in the trash. Digital photography eliminated the need for, and expense of, film and its development, and it also added an element we pros considered a cheat; graphic manipulation. One doesn't have to take advantage of the option to digitally alter their images, but for those of you who do not have a natural eye for good images, or the talent required to create them, a digital camera and its complimentary software can turn average photos into spectacular ones.
Digital cameras make it very easy to manipulate your images, even before taking the picture, and all of them come with photo enhancement software that enable you to 'fix your pics' afterward if they didn't come out as you'd intended. If the images are too dark, you can lighten them. If they are bland in color, you can add tint. If they're blurry, you can sharpen them, and so on. There are also creative enhancement features, such as picture frames and textures you can use with your images, making it lots of fun to "develop" your own photographs and show them off.
Couple all of this with the image quality of a digital camera, and the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in film and development you'll save by using one, and you have quite a wonderful kind of camera! Digitals do take better pictures than standard
'point & shoots' because point & shoot cameras are limited in what they are able to achieve. They are set at a fixed aperture and shutter speed combination; one that
does work for many, but not all, light situations.
Professional model (non-digital) SLR cameras, on the other hand, offer settings that can be adjusted by the photographer, and will take better pictures than the 'point & shoots'
if used to their potential. However, most people don't want to take the time to learn,
and deal with, all the technical stuff just to take a picture. They would rather touch-up and enhance an image afterward using a computer instead of trying to capture a flawless image on film. For these folks, the digital camera is the perfect choice. It does it all for you, even capturing movement and taking pictures in low-light situations, without you having to worry about what settings, lenses, and type of film to use.
Until recently, a digital camera was simply a technologically enhanced point-and-shoot. Their digital chips offered excellent color saturation and image quality, while the memory cards replaced film and the need for film processing and development.
This, and their ease-of-use, appealed to many photo hobbyists as well as those who wanted a simple all-around camera that gave them great pictures instantly.
Newer technology has combined the standard digital camera with the settings and lenses of the more advanced professional models. These SLR-Digital camera combinations are causing many pros to "go digital", as they offer the professional photographer the crisp, clear images of digital technology, while still having the ability to adjust camera settings and switch lenses, which gives them more control of the shot. These cameras are the best choice for the true professional, the photographer who prefers to capture an image the way his eye sees it and not change the color or scene
in any way. Because I prefer to capture nature and life at it's most pure state, and to show others exactly what I see, this is how I photograph. (See my article
People constantly ask me if my images are real. Yes. All of them are 100% natural.
I am very proud of this; that it's so hard for people to believe that I achieve what I do with just a non-digital camera and some film! Newer images, those that were taken digitally, were taken using standard, traditional settings on a SLR-digital camera, the very same way I woudl photograph with film. Nothing in the scene was altered digitally or graphically before or after the shot. My photographic prints are not touched up,
taken with color filters, manipulated or enhanced in any way. What you see, be it a beautiful dog or the autumn sun setting over a mountain, is exactly what my naked
eyes did when I clicked the shutter.
