Little Knowledge

In 1888, George Eastman began promoting the first hand-held Kodak
camera with the slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” His idea
was to make the film camera as convenient as the pencil. However, the film
king’s dream didn’t really come true until the invention of the digital
camera.
Certainly, conventional photography has long been as
simple as pressing a button, but the “we do the rest”
part — taking the film to a photo lab, deciding what
size and kind of prints to make, and then waiting for
the results — is a lot less convenient than using a
pencil.
Digital photography has finally put the entire
process of making pictures in the hands of the
person holding the camera. You press the button,
and you can do as much of the rest yourself as
you’re comfortable with. If all you want to do is point
and shoot, you can do that. If you want to get more
involved in the picture-taking and picture-making process,
digital photography gives you the tools for that, too.
You compose the picture through the viewfinder (as always), but now, you
can preview the exact photograph that you’re going to take on a bright LCD
(liquid crystal display) screen on the back of your camera. After snapping a
shot, you can instantly review the photos you’ve taken and erase the bad
pictures on the spot or “mark” the ones you want to print.

You don’t need to remember to stop and buy film. Your digital film is almost
infinitely reusable. You don’t have to drop off your digital film for finishing:
It’s “processed” instantly and ready for viewing or printing using your own
inexpensive color printer. No more sifting through stacks of prints of marginal
images. You decide which images to print and whether to make them
4 x 6 inches or 5 x 7 inches or some other size. You can print them at home
inexpensively or take a tiny digital memory card to a nearby retailer and
have even more inexpensive prints made for you in minutes by an in-store
digital print lab.
On the other hand, if you want to have full control over your photos, digital
photography gives you that, too, to a degree that has never before been
possible. Perhaps your images aren’t exactly right or could benefit from a
little cropping or other improvements. You can fix bad color, remove your
ex-brother-in-law from a family photo, or adjust the borders of an image to
focus on the most interesting subject matter. All you need is an image editor,
such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.


Article By Digital Photography for Dummies book