Digital Photography

With the rise of digital photography not only the process of taking pictures has changed, but also the attitude towards photography. We live now in an information age and everybody with the access to the Internet can express themselves on a larger forum. Nowadays, mainly thanks to smartphones people have access to digital cameras and are free to visually document their experiences. Fred Ritchin's article After Photography points towards many new possibilities which emerged with digital photography.



"You tend to be satisfied a lot more quickly but when you're shooting with film, you never know what you've got, and you push on and eventually it's the last image that's the good one [...] the digital allows you immediately to see what you missed"
I remember too well when taking pictures took time and thought, back before digital photography. You had to make important choices, which part of the landscape to photograph? will there be enough space on the film for later if I take two pictures in the same place? And then it took some time to analyze the object through the viewer, making sure that everything you wanted to will be included in the frame. With digital photography we can now take hundreds of pictures without worrying about the space on our tiny memory card and then choose the best images after analyzing them on a bigger computer screen.
So anybody can be a photographer nowadays, just shoot as many pictures as you can and with any luck there will be some great ones within the mass of images.

"[digital photographers] can frequently be seen looking down at their screen and pressing lots of buttons, even in the middle of an event"
The high accessibility to photography and the ability to document every moment of our lives nowadays can also have a questionably negative effect: you watch everything through the screen, in order to document it rather than be in the moment and enjoy the present:

"the photographer [is] thinking of  her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed"
Now with most of the people, especially the subjects of the photographs, having access to the images, the role of photography has shifted massively. They can influence the message through commenting and sharing online. Also, the photographer, being aware of the accessibility of their images, choose what to include in their photographs and how to present it in terms of the message as well as the artistic values.