I remember crossing the rail tracks behind my parents’ home in India way back in the 60’s when I was a little boy looking out for the big black huffing and puffing steam engine and its thousand and one carriages to roll past. It was my bi weekly thrill. As I grew older I noticed how my mother would sometimes head off to the old Xerox shop down the road to get her school work Photostat. She was a teacher in those days. Some of you may remember the old Kodak Instamatic Camera that was around in the 70’s. Well! It’s sad to see that’s all gone today as we now travel by electric trains, have super fast computers at home and we certainly don’t have Instamatics no more. Most of us have no idea what a 35MM camera is too. So what has replaced these things around us?

The American civil war was captured on film in the early 19^th century. Photography has since come a long way and has now given birth to digital photography as its latest offspring. A student at the Stanford University way back in 1963 invented a camera with a videodisk that had the ability to take and capture images on its disk for several minutes. Can you believe that? A few minutes only! This was to be the grandfather of digital cameras. This new form of taking snaps and storing them on a disk digitally has made photography less time consuming and has opened up a whole new world for the amateur photographer and at the same time helped the professional in his field of work. Kodak started to look at filmless technology in the 70’s and by the mid 80’s the compact disc technology hit the streets. It was no long ago in the 90’s that digital cameras first started to be seen and is now very common in the retail stores. Today’s digital cameras are certainly the precursor for the future in digital photography.

Digital cameras have taken the place of the old style cameras you see only in dated films now. They are the electric trains in the field of photography. Can you remember the days when you had to put a roll of film into your 35MM camera and then get the light meter adjusted on your camera and get all the distances properly set before you could actually take a photograph? Many of you may not remember this but this exciting and creative era of photography has slipped away to be replaced by new technology in camera development that has given birth to a generation of cameras that are so accurate and almost perfect in delivering your photographs just the way you see it outside the camera. Is this wonderful? Yes, certainly it is as digital photography has now allowed ordinary inexperienced people take perfect photos when they want. And the best part is they are so cheap. In fact the photos are free.

What is a digital camera in today's world of photography?

Film vs. Digital Photography

Digital cameras do not use film to capture the image but rather a highly sensitive chip that can not only capture but has the ability to store many snaps onto its memory. The number of snaps will vary depending onto the size of the chip. What I mean by this is that you do not have to buy a bigger chip that looks 3 or 4 time bigger but rather the chip itself inside has the ability to store the extra photos. The chip still looks the same size.