Digital photography is an extremely useful innovation in the field of photography. Its incredibly cheap to shoot with digital; you no longer have to buy rolls of film then pay to get them developed. By film I mean in general the standard 35mm that was used in most cameras, there are other formats which may allow for better shots but I have no experience with those. Digital allows you to shoot indiscriminately and to view your pictures in full size before you get them printed. There also are many advantages of having all your work saved electronically, you can edit them in Photoshop without having to scan them in, and if you ever want to look through your work and need to pull up some good pictures its very easy to do. Some photographers still maintain that there is something lost in digital that film captures, but in reality I believe the benefits outweigh any small disadvantages that may be present. Sure if you are an extremely skilled photographer and you have been working with film your whole life you may maintain that film is better, as for the less experienced of us digital is definitely the way to go. There is no reason why you cant get an excellent photo with a digital camera. There are so many variables that go into developing a good print off film that for anyone starting out in photography it is much better to start with digital. That way you can shoot all you want for basically free and constantly shooting is what it takes to develop your skills as a photographer. Many famous photographers, such as Steve McCurry, have switched to digital over film especially in the past decade as digital cameras have become more and more advanced.
The main advantage of digital is how easy it is to edit, and that with the capabilities of Photoshop you can turn a lackluster photo into something at least halfway decent. Here are some examples of how improved a picture can look after just messing around in Photoshop for a while with before and after shots included. I chose some of my first shots when I originally began experimenting with photography as they are the best examples of bad pictures I have.
A perfect example of a bad photo, its crooked, there is no real subject matter, the sky is a blown out, a large portion is out of focus specifically the lily pads, which are probably the most interesting part of the picture. Also the boathouse is distracting and out of place along with the bow of my boat that you can see in the upper right corner.
And this is my edit of the photo the boathouse and bow of my boat are cropped out, I increased the blacks and contrast in order to make it a little more dramatic, and straightened it. The sky is still blown out as that quiet difficult to fix in Photoshop and the lily pads are still out of focus which is impossible to fix, but there is a slight improvement in the photo. It's still not a good picture but its not quiet as bad to look at.
A perfect example of a bad photo, its crooked, there is no real subject matter, the sky is a blown out, a large portion is out of focus specifically the lily pads, which are probably the most interesting part of the picture. Also the boathouse is distracting and out of place along with the bow of my boat that you can see in the upper right corner.
And this is my edit of the photo the boathouse and bow of my boat are cropped out, I increased the blacks and contrast in order to make it a little more dramatic, and straightened it. The sky is still blown out as that quiet difficult to fix in Photoshop and the lily pads are still out of focus which is impossible to fix, but there is a slight improvement in the photo. It's still not a good picture but its not quiet as bad to look at.
Another poor quality picture, at least I had the right idea in photographing the lily pads. The photo is crooked, sky is blown out, foreground is out of focus and the trees in the background really don't add anything to the picture as they are not in focus and not interesting.
Again with the magical powers of Photoshop I did my best to save this picture. I upped blacks, contrast and vibrancy, cropped out the trees and straightened it. There is still the problem with the foreground being out of focus which really emphasizes how important it is to think about what should be in focus in a picture when your shooting it. In this case I remember I was trying to take a picture of the shoreline combined with the lily pads. A better way to have accomplished this would have been to set the f-stop higher to bring more of the picture in into better focus, and move closer to the shore to get a tighter shot. Also the exposure was wrong on the photo and I could have used a higher shutter speed.
I did what I could with this picture, adding a little color and contrast but its not possible to fix the sharpness as it is just blurry. I could improve it slightly by increasing the clarity but the beauty of the photo comes in a large part from the long exposure ghostly look that the water has. If I up the clarity the water loses its look. If only I had used a tripod it would have worked, but its a lesson learned.
