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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 13 2015, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-cheese dept.

The New York Times published a story about a young Kodak engineer's development of the first practical digital camera:

Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship. A world without iPhones or Instagram, where one company reigned supreme. Such a world existed in 1973, when Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak.

Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera.

Mr. Sasson, all of 24 years old, invented the process that allows us to make photos with our phones, send images around the world in seconds and share them with millions of people. The same process completely disrupted the industry that was dominated by his Rochester employer and set off a decade of complaints by professional photographers fretting over the ruination of their profession.

The camera he created looked rather odd (there is a picture in the article):

The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.

The article points out that Kodak owned the patent for the digital camera and made a fortune from it until it expired in 2007. Three years later Kodak itself expired, filing bankruptcy because it failed to properly utilize the technology it invented.

It may be an error to say that Mr. Sasson invented digital photography. Wasn't NASA doing it with its Mariner and Pioneer space probes?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:00AM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:00AM (#222135) Journal

    Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship.

    Imagine a world where real, professional photographers still devote years of study and apprenticeship to mastering their art form.

    Being able to bang off dozens of poorly composed snapshots on your iPhone and dump the lot onto Instagram does not make you a photographer (much less a photo-journalist) any more than microwaving a frozen pizza makes you a chef.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:20AM (#222162)

    Sometimes I go to the Wikipedia commons site and click through images at random. If you want to see a lot of unprofessional photos, that's one place to find them.

    I spent years studying film photography (amateur - no pro ambitions) and realized I'd never be really good at it. It is not easy at all. I developed a lot of technical skills both with the camera and in the darkroom, but that doesn't translate into art. I have a lot of respect for the pros and cringe at what passes for photography on the interwebs.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:47PM

      by Nuke (3162) on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:47PM (#222252)
      This stuff about taking years mastering the art of photography does not always apply.

      One of the greatest ever photographers was Henri Cartier-Bresson, and he left all the darkroom work to others. All he did was aim his camera and press the camera shutter button (Ok, set the shutter speed too), which he seems to have done by a born instinct - at "The Decisive Moment", the title of his book. A digital camera would have made no difference to him or his pictures.

      OTOH, another greatest ever photographer was Ansel Adams, who regarded pressing the shutter as just the start of a long creative process that would include hours in his darkroom perfecting every corner of his huge prints.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:33PM (#222502)

        This is true in any field - some people are just geniuses.

        Once Adams had perfected his zone system, he didn't need to be in the darkroom. He would write down the instructions for developing and printing and leave it to his assistants.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:46AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:46AM (#222174) Homepage
    A-fucking-men. However, some of the so-called, and so-paid, professionals appear to not have actually done anything apart from robotic rote learning and still lack understanding. (Put that rule of thirds in the bin right now, for example - if you follow that, you're the idiot, not me for willfully ignoring it (I won't say "violating" it, that implies that I've promoted it to the level where it's worth "violating" - I've not, it simply doesn't exist for me). And the "expose to the right" digital photardgrophers mostly haven't got a clue about how the device in their hands actually works. Etc. etc., rant, rant, rant.)
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:29PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:29PM (#222268) Homepage Journal

    Indeed; that statement was obviously written by someone young enough to have never experienced analog photography. Kodak came into existence in 1888, which is when it stopped being a process that "is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship." Everyone had cameras when I was a kid. It was, however, a slow process. Faster for me, since I learned how to develop film when I was about 12 but it still took an hour to develop the film, project the negatives onto print paper, and hours for the paper to dry.

    And as you said, just because you can point a camera and take a picture doesn't make you a photographer. A photographer has to know composition, perspective, and all the other things any visual artist needs to know.

    I wrote about photography in the introduction to Yesterday's Tomorrows (that part of the foreword I took from an article I wrote a couple of years ago). It deals with changes in technology that no one ever foresaw or could ever foresee, like the smartphone. A snippet:

    When I was five, a camera, even a small one, was a bulky thing that usually sat in a closet or drawer until a vacation or a birthday party or some other special occasion came along. You would go to the drugstore, buy a few rolls of film, photograph what you wanted, send the film to be developed, and the photos would come back a week later.

    This marvelous device will take a decent picture without film, instantly viewable in color, and can be immediately sent to anyone in the entire world.

    Here is the forword [mcgrewbooks.com] (actually, the whole book)

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