Digital Photography

I remember when I visited the US Senate in 2002, I was surprised to find that the journalists there had all switched to digital cameras. I talked to the Senate’s Head of Media, who told me that they had just done so, all across the board. Six years ago this was really a new thing…Well, at least to me.

As with news writing, photography has also changed in the digital age. And, as with news writing many things remain the same. Digital photography has, obviously, become the standard in online journalism, but also in traditional newspapers. While some photographers still prefer film because of artistic or sentimental reasons, the advantages of digital has persuaded most to switch.

The advantages of digital are easy to recognize. The freedom of being able to edit photos on your laptop saves a lot of time, not to mention being able to see your pictures right away. However, photography is still photography and a good picture is still a good picture. The rule of threes, which has its origin in paintings, also applies to modern photography. I guess the aesthetics do not change just because technology does.

Since pictures have now been reduced to files, it is important to save your pictures in the right image size. Large files take a long time to load, so you should always resize images to make them fit on a webpage. Photoshop is a good tool for editing and resizing. It is fun to use and it allows you to really enhance your pictures significantly. Photos for print newspapers need to be of a better resolution than those for the web. The wonderful thing about digital photography is that if you just remember to save your original you can edit it and resize it as many times as you want.

When taking pictures you need to think about framing, the position of your object, and the angle from which you take the picture. While editing can do many things, you - the photographer, still need to apply the basic rules of what a good picture is, when shooting.