LESSON 82
History IV: the digital era
From film's decline to phones everywhere.
IN THIS LESSON
- The switch
- Cameras in phones
- Sharing as the new print
- Computation becomes the camera
- In practice: what has not changed
The switch
Digital cameras arrived commercially in the 1990s and changed photography quickly. In the first decade of this century film declined as digital cameras became cheaper, easier to use and better. The industry felt it. AgfaPhoto filed for bankruptcy within six months of being split off, Konica Minolta stopped making colour film and paper by 31 March 2007, and by 2005 Kodak employed fewer than a third of the people it had twenty years earlier. Kodachrome, the film that opened the colour era in the 1930s, was discontinued in 2009, and its last processing ended in December 2010. Lesson 15 covers film formats that survive.
Cameras in phones
Starting around 2000, digital cameras were built into mobile phones, and phone cameras spread quickly, helped by their connection to email and social media. The image sensors in them, active pixel sensors, have largely replaced the CCD of the first digital cameras. Billions of people now carry one, and the source notes that this has greatly increased the number of pictures made and has fuelled citizen journalism. Since 2010, compacts and DSLRs have also faced mirrorless cameras, which typically offer better image quality than compact or phone cameras while being smaller than typical DSLRs. Lesson 64 looks at phone photography in practice.
Sharing as the new print
Once cameras were standard on smartphones, taking pictures and posting them online became part of daily life around the world. Instagram, launched on the App Store on 6 October 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, at first allowed only square pictures 640 pixels wide, to fit the iPhone screen of the time. It reached a million users in two months, Facebook bought it in April 2012 for about a billion US dollars, and it reached a billion users in June 2018. Other services, such as Flickr, Facebook and Snapchat, have also been used by many millions to share pictures.
Computation becomes the camera
The newest change is that software now shapes the picture as much as the lens. Computational photography means capture and processing techniques that use computing in place of optics: in-camera panoramas, high dynamic range images made from several exposures, and light-field cameras that allow focus to be changed after the shot. The source notes that, as of 2019, such techniques let amateurs make pictures that rival professional work, though they did not outperform professional equipment. Many phones now merge several frames automatically whenever a scene is hard, as lesson 57 explains.
In practice: what has not changed
This section is working practice. The tools have changed more in thirty years than in the century before, but the questions in the earlier history lessons have not: what to point the camera at, when to press, what to leave out, and whether the picture tells the truth. Editing tools and generated images make that last question more urgent. Keep your originals, say what you changed when it matters, and judge pictures by what they show and how they were made.
Try it today
- 01Find the oldest digital photograph you own and note its pixel size.
- 02Compare it with a picture from your current phone at full size.
- 03List three things your phone does automatically that a 1990s camera could not.
- 04Turn one of those features off and take the same picture both ways.
- 05Write two sentences on what you would tell a viewer about how the picture was made.