Digital Photography

1. What is the difference between analog photography and digital photography?

First of all, the difference between analog photography and digital photography is that analog photography involves chemical process that is related to photographic film. But digital photography would involve digital process. Indeed, analog photography is more traditional than digital photography in the way of taking photos.

Secondly, digital photography can have digital manipulation. That means we can change everything in a photo, for example, adjusting the colour tones and the contrast between brightness and darkness. Also, we can add any special effects like composing lots of interesting pictures or combining two photos in one frame. All these can be done by Photoshop software and so on. But analog photography is rigid relatively as it only records what you see and shows the most truthful thing. Sometimes, I think analog photography can be more objective that we cannot alter the details of the photos.

Finally, for digital photography, we can save photos in a memory stick, CD or any other electronic devices. It is convenient for us to choose the photos we like and delete the one we don't want to keep either. These functions are something that analog photography cannot do as well.

2. What use is digital technology to photographers?

As the above mention, digital technology can let us alter the photos. For example, we can change the tonal value of the dark and light or choose the natural scenes to be the background  in the photos. Although it would change the content of the photos, people would use digital technology as it can make a great different in the photo and make the photos more interesting.

3. Is photographic truth at an end? Has it ever existed? http://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/features/digital_essay.html

According to the above website, photographic truth seems to be at an end. Undoubtedly, digital manipulation is becoming commonplace nowadays. Everyone can change the colour or even clean up the details in a photo but leave no tracks. So, it is difficult for us to identify the photo is fake or not. And it definitely affects our sense or thinking when the photos are manipulated. Therefore, photographic truth will be at an end.

In fact, there are many photos are manipulated in newspapers or magazines. For example, people like to change the colour tones of the model's face or adjust the lighting of photos. It can make the photo more beautiful or even perfect. However, photographic truth would not exist. The original photos are "disappeared".

When we see a photo, what the photo are showing may not be the truth whether or not people change the photo by digital manipulation. However, keeping the original or 'truthful' photo can be one evidence in our history. Newspaper should keep the photographic truth as well. Just like keeping the concept of sincererity in our mind. Hope we can do it.

The left one is original photo.

And the right one is the photo I used Photoshop software to manipulate it.