Digital Photography...what took it so long?

Digital Photography…what took us so long?

An American photographer,David Bergman,took a panoramic photograph of President Barack Obama’s inauguration with a digital camera and a device called a Gigapan. The picture is amazing not only because it covers such a large area, but because, when you zoom in on pretty much anyone in the crowd, you can see them clearly.

Rewind
Now, rewind back for just a moment to 1979, when I bought my first SLR. It was an Olympus OM1, cost IR£150 (today’s equivalent would probably be around €600) and I had to wind my film through and around a serious of spindles to load it. When I took my photographs, I brought the film to the chemist and waited for 2-3 weeks for my photographs to come back. This is what everybody did, unless of course you had a Polaroid Camera, (read the other article on this on by blog). But then came the Digital Camera.

History
Put “History of Digital Photography” into any search engine and you’ll get hundreds of results. Pretty much all of them will tell you that it began with an idea, as does everything. Eugene F. Lally was the man with the idea in this case. In 1961, when he was working for the Jet Propulsion Labortory in the US, Lally wanted the spaceship to be able to take pictures of planets and stars so as to chart its position as it travelled through space. But he didn’t develop (oops…sorry!) the idea very far, and it wasn’t until 1975 that the first digital still camera was actually patented by an Eastman Kodak engineer called Steven Sasson. Resolution was 0.01 megapixels and the shutter speed was 23 seconds. It was the size of a toaster and look like this...


Well, it was a beginning.



Fast Forward
Fast forward now through analogue cameras, Luigi Colani designer cameras, still-video-recording-to-solid-state-memory-camera (The Homic), the Fuji DS-1P, (first ‘true’ digital hand held camera, developed in 1988, but never sold!?) and on to 1990, when we have the first digital camera to actually go on sale, the Dycam Model 1. This had an internal 1MB Ram, 376 x 240pixels, a shutter speed of between 1/30 and 1/1000 and a built-in flash. It was also attached to a PC to transfer images. It cost $995. Now we’re getting somewhere!

But…
Adobe Photoshop also emerged in 1990, and this was significant. Now whatever quality was lost through the camera could be made up on the computer.

Today
Fast forward again to today and everyone has a digital camera, even if only on their phone. The average half-decent camera costs less than €100, has a resolution of 10megapixels and many can fit in a pocket or handbag. And, take a look at David Bergman’s website at to see what you can do with one, an accessory called a Gigapan and a computer. This, for me, is an amazing example of where digital photography is right now. It’s taken 50 almost years to get here though, and that’s a long time in the history of technology.

For David Bergman’s site, go to http://www.davidbergman.net/obama.html

A History of Digital Photography is at: http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39029429,49293172-1,00.htm

And there’s more history at: http://photocritic.org/digital-photography-history/