 "Exclusive frame to mass fame")
Photography is no longer an exclusive domain; the digital age has helped to bring out the shutterbug in ordinary people. On World Photography Day, we take a look at the change in focus
The other day, a cousin called to inform me about a new gamepad he had spotted at the mall. A casual gamer who didn't consider himself tech-savvy, he just clicked a picture of the product on his phone and sent it to me as a multimedia message. A friend was recently gushing about her newborn nephew - born early that morning in the UK - whose pictures her brother-in-law had uploaded on flickr. And then I heard my wife passionately discussing the finer nuances of a vindaloo with my father, and why she just couldn't get the colour right (she'd shared the picture on Facebook with my father, the originator of the recipe.)
Different events but for a common thread - a picture being the talking point. Today we upload tonnes of photos on Facebook, flickr, Instagram, Picasa or any other photo website without a second thought. But for someone like me, who was initiated into the world of photography during the analogue era, it's still a wonder how the digital age has brought photography closer to common people.
The birth of modern photography, so to say, was in 1839, with the daguerreotype process. That year, on August 19, the French government announced the invention as a gift "Free to the World", says the website worldphotoday.org.
Since 2009, August 19 is celebrated as World Photography Day. That year, Korske Ara, a 21-year-old photographer from Australia, launched the World Photography Day Project with an aim to "unite local and global communities in a worldwide celebration of photography", their website worldphotoday.org says. On August 19, the very next year, the project hosted its first global online gallery with 270 photos, which had visitors from more than 100 countries. Thus World Photography Day was born.
Till the coming of the digital age, photography as a hobby was expensive and one had to bide time for the final results. Say you took a wonderful shot of a sunset, you had to wait till the entire film roll was exhausted till you could trudge down to the studio to develop it, find out from the "negative" if the shot was good enough and then get it printed. If one added up the cost of the film and development and printing charges, it was generally north of Rs 500 per film roll.
With the coming of the digital age, things got simple, but it was only with the advent of decent cameras on mobile phones that photography has become more "democratic".
Any recent high-end smartphone boasts of features only available in point-and-shoot cameras a couple of years ago.
"We have a saying in photographers' circles that 'a camera in hand is worth two in the bag'. And camera-phones come to the rescue in a pinch in a lot of situations," said Kaustav Saikia, a fashion photographer who's part of memory maker Sandisk's Extreme Team.
"With improved cameraphones, the ordinary people have also got hooked to photography," said Akash Das, a renowned photographer and part of Sandisk's Extreme Team.
Many phones now bundle in decent photo-editing tools, while most mid-range cameras and all dSLRs have some sort of image editing software on board. With photo services such as flickr offering as much as 1TB of storage, one can save all photos and videos on the cloud - and most recent smartphones generally offer the feature.
In the coming years, there is buzz that cameras/phones will come with all the software one needs to touch up a picture before uploading it (again from the device itself). Likewise, 3D capture of photos and motion could also become de rigueur.
The days of making the trudge to the studio is long over. And I doubt if in the future we'll even need to "print" in the conventional manner. For all you know, we'd use a bendable e-ink display.
The other day, a cousin called to inform me about a new gamepad he had spotted at the mall. A casual gamer who didn't consider himself tech-savvy, he just clicked a picture of the product on his phone and sent it to me as a multimedia message. A friend was recently gushing about her newborn nephew - born early that morning in the UK - whose pictures her brother-in-law had uploaded on flickr. And then I heard my wife passionately discussing the finer nuances of a vindaloo with my father, and why she just couldn't get the colour right (she'd shared the picture on Facebook with my father, the originator of the recipe.)
| FOR THOSE PERFECT PRINTS: Canon PIXMA PRO-10 |
| If you’re serious about what you click and want nothing short of studio-quality prints at home, the Canon PIXMA PRO-10 would make you happy. With 10 separate ink tanks to reproduce those rolling landscapes in detail, the printer is also capable of printing on A3-size paper, so you can personalise those posters after that safari to Masai Mara. For those who feel that the beauty of light and shade can only be captured in black and white, the PRO-10 won’t disappoint — it has three separate cartridges for the black shade. The PRO-10 can be connected to the network with its built-in Wi-Fi or LAN port and also supports printing on DVDs or CDs. The printer supports a plethora of paper sizes — from 4” x 6” photo paper to A3, as also borderless printing. The printer takes a little less than four minutes to print an A3-size colour page. The printer comes with the Print Studio Pro plug-in, compatible with Adobe Photoshop among a host of other popular image editing software, to help get optimum settings in a jiffy. The printer doesn’t make too much noise, but has a large footprint. But such good quality comes at a price, and in the case of the PRO-10, its Rs 65,995. — BS Reporter |
Different events but for a common thread - a picture being the talking point. Today we upload tonnes of photos on Facebook, flickr, Instagram, Picasa or any other photo website without a second thought. But for someone like me, who was initiated into the world of photography during the analogue era, it's still a wonder how the digital age has brought photography closer to common people.
The birth of modern photography, so to say, was in 1839, with the daguerreotype process. That year, on August 19, the French government announced the invention as a gift "Free to the World", says the website worldphotoday.org.
Since 2009, August 19 is celebrated as World Photography Day. That year, Korske Ara, a 21-year-old photographer from Australia, launched the World Photography Day Project with an aim to "unite local and global communities in a worldwide celebration of photography", their website worldphotoday.org says. On August 19, the very next year, the project hosted its first global online gallery with 270 photos, which had visitors from more than 100 countries. Thus World Photography Day was born.
Till the coming of the digital age, photography as a hobby was expensive and one had to bide time for the final results. Say you took a wonderful shot of a sunset, you had to wait till the entire film roll was exhausted till you could trudge down to the studio to develop it, find out from the "negative" if the shot was good enough and then get it printed. If one added up the cost of the film and development and printing charges, it was generally north of Rs 500 per film roll.
With the coming of the digital age, things got simple, but it was only with the advent of decent cameras on mobile phones that photography has become more "democratic".
Any recent high-end smartphone boasts of features only available in point-and-shoot cameras a couple of years ago.
"We have a saying in photographers' circles that 'a camera in hand is worth two in the bag'. And camera-phones come to the rescue in a pinch in a lot of situations," said Kaustav Saikia, a fashion photographer who's part of memory maker Sandisk's Extreme Team.
"With improved cameraphones, the ordinary people have also got hooked to photography," said Akash Das, a renowned photographer and part of Sandisk's Extreme Team.
Many phones now bundle in decent photo-editing tools, while most mid-range cameras and all dSLRs have some sort of image editing software on board. With photo services such as flickr offering as much as 1TB of storage, one can save all photos and videos on the cloud - and most recent smartphones generally offer the feature.
In the coming years, there is buzz that cameras/phones will come with all the software one needs to touch up a picture before uploading it (again from the device itself). Likewise, 3D capture of photos and motion could also become de rigueur.
The days of making the trudge to the studio is long over. And I doubt if in the future we'll even need to "print" in the conventional manner. For all you know, we'd use a bendable e-ink display.