This is part of a series about the first decade of the twenty-first century, also known as the Zero Decade or zerodec. Text from DJCline.com.
Photography
Ten years ago I was still using film. I tend toward small simple cameras and my workhorse was an old school Minolta 101. You could get parts and service for it anywhere in the world. It acted a little wonky in below zero temperatures but it did the job.
For social occasions I used the last generation of small automatics by Canon or Olympus. What people don’t remember was the time and equipment it took to process film. Setting up even a small black and white darkroom was an ordeal and color processing required a machine the size of a car. It took an hour to process a roll of 36 pictures. If you wanted the picture online you had to scan it in and it looked like it had been shoved through cheesecloth.
The need for speed drove me to digital. I had been using digital cameras since the 1980s, but was not impressed with their resolution. The Sony Mavica had a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels or roughly half a megapixel. The images were used for websites with tight deadlines. I’d take the pictures, take out the floppy disk, put it in my laptop and use my dial-up connection to upload the picture. It still took forever.
That was considered state of the art until the Canon PowerShot series. In ten years I’ve gone from one megapixel to twelve. People argue about the resolution but I can read a nametag from across a room or pick individual trees off a mountainside. I still upload with a laptop and a wireless connection. It still takes forever but the images are glorious.
The future? Cameras are moving from a separate dedicated device to just a feature on a cell phone. Like early digital cameras, the images are poor quality but it is faster to upload and distribute images. This turns everybody into a reporter. I still cannot get over the picture earlier this year from a demonstration in Iran. A man pointed a gun at woman. She pointed a phone at him and uploaded the picture. That is power of technology. That is something you could not do ten years ago.
Copyright 2009 DJ Cline All rights reserved.
Posted by dj in Commentary []