Digital VS Darkroom Photography Part I

This is the first of a little two-part series speaking of Photographic media. I have used two so far I believe (not counting cyanotypes and my camera obscura which I posted in a previous entry). First up, digital photography methods.

Digital Cameras

We all know what these are. Heck, most of us have them on us at all times if we have a smartphone. Digital Cameras give us such an easy way of capturing images on digital space. We can archive them, remaster them with programs such as Photoshop and Lightroom, we can share them on social media, make digital collages, we can even print them to have physical versions of our pictures. Digital cameras have the advantage that you can see what's going on as you photograph, they have screens and batteries and light meters that aid in taking well-exposed pictures. There's even an option to view grids and margins in the camera screen to help compose the images exactly the way we need. My main medium is digital photography taken with my digital camera. There are a few other methods, but this is the one I have experience with.

Here's my digital camera:

Why Do I Love Digital Photo?

From a professional standpoint, it is extremely efficient for business. If I want to have commercial photography available for my brand, digital photography is the most effective method. It allows me to take as many pictures as I need, as quickly as I need and then I can either send them digitally or print them out and mail them, all by pressing different buttons and focusing on getting good, consistent results. I also love the fact that I can play with my compositions as much as I want and immediately be able to look at the image and see if the result is what I wanted, or if I need to continue to change things in order to achieve my goal. Digital space is also a huge advantage, I only need a hard drive, or a memory card to have thousands of images readily available. I just plug it into a computer and voila! All my files are there. These are just a few advantages/reasons that I like Digital media.

Making Prints

The last thing I'll talk about is making prints from Digital Photos. When I say I print out my pictures, everyone thinks it's just two buttons, print and done. But printing is so much more than that. When printing an image, I have to decide how I'm going to do it: what type of paper am I using? What size will it be? Should I do it in color or black and white? If I'm doing a series: what is the sequencing for it? How do I edit my colors if I'm printing in color to achieve a print with the saturation I want? If I'm printing in black and white, how does my crop and size make the composition stand out?

Printing is so much more complicated than just hitting a button, and nothing compares to getting a good print of your work and being able to look at it with satisfaction. Here are some of my own prints:

I hope you've enjoyed this intro,

the next post will be about Film Photography.

-Gabe <3