In Praise of Digital Photography
Posted on December 21, 2009
Filed Under Digital Camera Features, Good Digital Cameras |
In any job, you will have what many believe of as “the purists”. Purists are those who revere the way things have always been done and view new innovations in the field as upstarts and obviously of poorer quality than the tried and proven methods.
This is nowhere as true than photography. For decades the film and chemical processing method has undergone continual refinement to get bigger and higher levels of sophistication and to find more pure means of quality. Small wonder that when the digital revolution came along, “the purists” were, to say the least, a bit snobby about the idea of professional photography going in the right way.
But there are some genuine reasons to at least incorporate digital technology into your professional photography business plans. These reasons are suprising enough that more and more we are seeing the big studios going all digital. So if you are running an sole photography business or if you are “just” a photography hobbyist (and thank God for the hobbyists), you may have to think through the reason for converting to digital processing yourself.
User-Friendly.
The amount of frustration and sheer “stuff” of doing a shoot digitally is considerably less involved than using the old technologies. Witness how the digital revolution in photography has changed the personal camera world. Now camera users can take as many pictures as they want and have them to review virtually instantaneously.
Probably the steepest leap to the front in the use of digital photography is that you can do re-shoots quickly, easily and for virtually no cost. If you take a family portrait with a customer, you can have the “stills” of the session available almost as soon as the session is done. If a shot was good but not perfect, you can correct it and re-shoot immediately saving huge amounts of time and improving the chances you will get the portfolio you want and that the customer wants on the first session.
Rapid Customer Service.
The immediate thoughts we get when a technology delivers so much value to the buyers is that quality will go down. But, suprisingly, this is not the case with digital photography. If anything, the quality of the photographs is as good or better than any we could do with initial technologies. And the cost both to you as the photographer and to your customer drops off so dramatically that the age old complaint the customer has had about professional photographs costing a lot of money can be eliminated making the customer want to use your photographic talents more often.
Digital photography, being a youngster of the world wide web and the digital revolution that has entered our lives by using personal computers, can be delivered in a variety of ways and at a speed that was unheard of prior to the quick arrival of this technology. We can deliver the photos through email, by posting them to an website photo collage or by burning them to a DVD or CD so the customer can order lots more shots for the same cost and have them delivered in a way that easy to view and store.
Photo manipulating has vividly moved from the realm of the dark room techs to something any of us can do due to the sophisticated computer programs, such as Picasa, that we can use to improve the pictures we take. It is really amazing the effects that can be imposed on a image with this software. But more importantly we can so much more easily correct color imperfections with a photograph so what might have been a lost session can be improved to become really great with some clever use of camera software editing.
In virtually every way, digital photography, delivery and editing is superior to the way “the purists” would have us hold on to. It makes our lives as photographers easier, faster and more profitable. But mostly, this is something our customers want us to use. They get to enjoy their digital images at a faster pace, at a more reasonable cost and the pictures can be emailed to relatives and posted on their family web sites which is fun for everyone. So despite our desire to be “purists”, every reason we need is there to convince us that digital photography is the way to take photographs.
Author:Richard’s Photography Portrait Studios in San Antonio
Providing professional photography in San Antonio for 18 years.
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