digital photography

I think digital photography is an interesting new technology - I've been following the evolution of the technology pretty much since it became commercial, because my dad does fine art photography and has been trying the technology since it came out. The first digital camera he got was 1.2 megapixels, which is less than my phone has now. He now has a 13 megapixel camera, which allows him to have the picture stretched and printed at 11inchesx14inches without pixilization, so it is actually a reasonable substitution for traditional photography.

One of my dad's dislikes for digital photography is that you can photoshop it to take out problems - kind of like painting. With a painting, you can "edit" while you paint to take out things like telephone poles from photos of beaches, etc. whereas you had to actually find the picture with photography. Now, you can *take* that picture and just make it "look right" to you.

Photoshop is fairly easy to do - websites like fark.com have photoshop contests every day that show really realistic (or not, depending on the contest) photos. Something Awful does photoshop phridays with similar ideas. It is a problem when one of these images are taken seriously and spread around the web (you can typically see examples on snopes.com of images that started as jokes but were then taken seriously).

An example of a fark.com photoshop:

(the original)

and

This movie I thought was also very interesting in terms of ease of photo manipulation - becoming easier every day.