The digitisation of photography
The death of Kodak
The death of Kodak
After 22 years of analogue photography (and 22,000 negatives) using an Olympus OM-10 and a subsequent succession of OM-2's, I made the transition to digital photography.
As the price of sensible-quality (at least 5.2MPixels of non-interpolated CCD) digital cameras with real (non fixed-focus) lenses descended in to the realistic (sub-$1,000) arena I began the (sometimes painful) transition to providing a workable, high-quality digital workflow.
Starting with an Epson Perfection SCSI flat-bed scanner to scan existing prints and MS Photo Editor to edit (ugh...) I upgraded to a Canon FS2700 negative scanner, Canon software and JASC Paint Shop Pro (a little better), then again to a Canon FS4000 4000-dpi negative/slide scanner, Hamrick Vuescan and PhotoShop 6.0 (acceptable quality but a steep learning curve...) and finally to a Canoscan 8800F and Photoshop CS2.
I burnt the .TIFs to DVD and produced index prints, later I transferred the whole lot to a NAS device backed up to a second device in a remote location.
I printed to an Epson R1800 on Epson premium Glossy photo paper and use a Spyder 2 to colour balance the screen and printer using .icm profiles.
It changed the way I viewed my existing photographs: negatives that were previously unusable could be re-cropped, rotated, colour-adjusted, reduced to black and white, and otherwise manipulated in PhotoShop.
Wires, posts, signs, errant fingers, drunken angles couldn be removed.
The digital darkroom is a wonderful place, but cannot pull detail from a badly under-exposed original; it's not a miracle cure.
It changed the way I took photographs - if a composition was perfect apart from an errant telegraph pole, pedestrian or overhead cable I could still take the shot, safe in the knowledge that I could remove the blemish later.
I continued with the OM2 but only had the films processed, I would generate the edited prints later.
In the summer of 2002 the first affordable true 5.2MP digital camera arrived in the form of the Sony DSC-F717 and I made the transition.
The Olympuses were retired (and sold well). 18 months later I upgraded to an 8MP Sony DSC-F828 and swapped to using the RAW file format for greater flexibility, then 3 years later to a DSLR: the Sony A-100 and in 2016 I went medium-format in the form of a full-frame DSLR, the Canon EOS-6D. Eye-wateringly expensive, as were the lenses but oh, the quality.......
In these days of iPhones in our pockets, full-frame DSLR's and Photoshop, cloud storage and auto-backup it's hard to remember how little control we had over our images. iPhones have truly democratised photography and maybe, just maybe, we have lost something along the way.