DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Digital photography has surpassed film photography in popularity in recent years, a fact  that has relegated some amateur and professional film cameras to the unlikely task of becoming a paperweight. In the art world, however, film cameras are  coveted. The lesson is simple: choose the tools that you  need to get the results you want. Just a couple of years ago a professional would have chosen from a vast array of film camera types—single lens  reflexes, twin lens reflexes, rangefinders, and view cameras to name a few—when selecting the tools of his or her  trade. Now, with the advent of digital technology and digital software, the serious photographer can, for the most  part, rely on a digital single-lens reflex camera, or D-SLR.

A D-SLR is an incredibly advanced and refined tool  that still offers the all-important ability, as in film version cameras, to view your subject through the same lens that  records the image onto your sensor. This is achieved via a mirror and a pentaprism so that what you see is what  you get (often referred to as WYSIWYG). It is hard to  imagine that every time you press the shutter to take a  picture, a mirror between the rear of the lens and the image sensor flips out of the way, the camera shutter  opens, and the sensor is exposed for the required time.  Meanwhile, the camera’s microprocessor is writing the multitude of information the image sensor has recorded  to the camera’s memory card. This is incredible in itself. Now consider how incredible are the cameras used by  sport and press photographers, which manage this at  eight frames a second!

For all intents and purposes, there are two types of  D-SLR cameras. The first is a traditional-looking camera  roughly based on the 35mm film camera bodies that preceded it. Photographers who would normally use both medium- and large-format professional cameras are discovering that in some instances the modern high-end D-SLR provides superior image quality when compared to the scan that was possible from their film. (The “format” of a camera refers to the size of the negative of film ?