why use digital photography instead of traditional??

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I'm doing a multi-media course at college, and in the photography part we've got to research why photographers use digital photography, and which kind of photographers use it. Also, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using digital and not traditional. Thanks for any help offered!!

-- jemmah (jemmah@gmail.com), November 08, 2004

Answers

wow.. now THERE's a can of worms. in brief:

PROS: - digital is faster than film from a media business' point of view; since publishing went digital several years ago, before photography caught up it meant an awful lot of time-consuming scanning.

- it is a lot cheaper from the industry's point of view (but see below). newspapers no longer have enormous (and they were HUGE) film and processing fees.

- from a consumer point of view, it means easy emailing, web uploading, etc, but i'm not sure if you just refer to professionals.

CONS: - there is a lot more that can go wrong with colour profiling, colour balancing, file sizing and other computer-oriented technical issues that are now the preserve of the photographers rather than the scanning specialists. many photographers do not (have not) re- trained to keep up with the complex techniques that digital photography necessitates.

- it is not cheaper than film overall; the money a company saves in film and processing it now spends because the photographers have in effect become the processing house; sitting at our computers uploading, processing, saving and uploading the images rather than taking more photos. as a freelancer, clients often say.. oh, but if you shoot digital then i don't have to pay for film. but of course after a day's shooting rather than drop the films at the lab i now have to spend most of the following day (or night) processing them myself. and of course i'm going to charge for that.

that's in a nutshell as i could talk about this for days. call up your local newspaper and talk to the head of their picture desk.

cheers.

-- james madelin (james@ww.co.nz), November 15, 2004.


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