Digital Photography Tutorial

Digital capture and editing has radically transformed photography as we know it. It’s hard to believe, but as little time ago as the 1990s, people were still commonly shooting photographs using film, dropping it off to a film lab, and being happy with whatever they got back! This lesson is about some of the major changes to photography wrought by the advent of digital photography.

Probably the biggest change brought by digital cameras is the ability to review images immediately after they are captured. For beginners this is a learning tool of immense value – there’s no more waiting two weeks to see the results of your experimentation. For experienced and professional photographers, it’s a way of reviewing results on-the-fly to ensure that – no more wasting an entire role of film because you’re inadvertently used the wrong settings.

The other big change in digital photography is the ability to alter ISO from shot to shot. Your camera’s ISO setting indicates how sensitive it is to light. At a low setting, such as ISO 100, the sensor inside your camera is not very sensitive to light (meaning that a larger aperture or longer shutter speed might be needed), but the results will be detailed and won’t be marred by digital noise. At a higher setting, such as ISO 800, the sensor is more sensitive, but the results may suffer from a lack of sharpness and some digital noise.

The ability to change ISO from shot to shot means that you can go from a bright environment to a dark one and back again without having to do more than twiddle a dial – not something that was possible during the days of film photography!

Equally important, if not more so, than digital cameras, are the software packages that allow us to edit digital images after they are captured. The best known of these is Adobe’s Photoshop, but there are many others. Photo editing programs allow captured images to be cropped, rotated, sharpened, adjusted for color and contrast, and much more.

While many people associate Photoshop with professional photographers and with image doctoring, the reality is that almost any digital image will benefit from some editing. If you haven’t already tried editing your digital photos, try it today – there are plenty of free image editing programs available online that will give you a taste of the possibilities.