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Digital Imaging Essay

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Digital Imaging Digital imaging inevitably undermines photography’s status as an essentially truthful medium. Discuss.

Until recently, at least, it was possible to define photography as a process involving optics, light sensitive material and the chemical processing of this material to produce prints or slides. Today though, that definition is subject to change. Technological innovations…are shifting photography from its original chemical basis towards electronics… It is not overstating it to say that the advent of this new technology is changing the very nature of photography, as we have known it. (Bode and Wombell 1991)

In the last decade computer technology has been introduced to photography yet again challenging the meaning …show more content…

3) An unprecedented ease, sophistication and invisibility of enhancing and manipulating photographic images.

4) The entry of photographic images into a global information and communications system as they become instantaneously transmissible in the form of electronic pulses passing along telephone lines and via satellite links.

5) The high-speed transmission of news images which are no longer containable within territorial and political boundaries.

6) The conversion of existing photographs and historical archives into digital storage banks, which can be accessed at the screens of remote computer terminals.

7) The potential of the new information and image networks for greatly extending the practises of military and civil surveillance.

8) The unprecedented convergence of the still photographic image with other, previously distinct, media: digital audio, video, graphics, animation and other kinds of data in new forms of interactive multi media.

However as the authors stressed, probably more significant than the change in how images are produced, distributed and used, are the ideas to which the changes are giving rise and how digital imaging is challenging and changing traditional ways of seeing and thinking. It seems that our traditional belief that ‘the camera never lies’ has been brought into question. It also appears important to consider who

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