Eliminate the negative

Point and shoot.

That still might not be all it takes to be a photographer, but digital cameras have made the art more accessible than ever before.

With ever-evolving technology, shooting, editing and publishing photos has opened the doors for amateur photographers to create professional-quality work.

The late 1980s and early ’90s – around the time many IU students were born – saw a digital revolution, said School of Fine Arts associate professor of photography James Nakagawa, as the first cameras using chips instead of film came to the mainstream. Whereas buying film, loading a camera and developing photos in a dark room left photography mostly in the realm of professionals, technology has allowed more amateurs to pick up a camera and start shooting.

“It definitely opens it up to people who don’t know what they’re doing,” said sophomore Cassie Davis, an amateur photographer.

With online tutorials and downloadable freeware to help enhance photos and “smart camera” features like auto-focus, Davis said anyone can take good photos, even if they have had no formal training. If the user wants to play with features like shutter speed, most smart cameras will tell them how to adjust other factors, like aperture, to compensate for the change in exposure.

Digital camera technology also spurred the creation of better software for digital manipulation of photos. Nakagawa said he started using Photoshop while he was in graduate school in 1992.

He also warned of the dangers of flawless manipulation, as photos are usually meant to be representations of reality. He said the photographer, amateur or professional, is responsible to the audience for the content of their work, even if they can seamlessly change the photo content.

“They need to be aware of the power of images,” Nakagawa said.

While Photoshop is arguably still the dominant software, many people such as sophomore Alena Johantgen use a free program called Picasa, which allows the user to change photo aspects like tints, contrast and brightness levels, as well as organize them into digital “albums.”

It is also infinitely easier to mass-distribute personal photos with the rise of the Internet and networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. There are Web sites specifically intended for photo-sharing, like Flickr, which members of IU’s Photography Society, or PhoSo, use to show each other their work.

PhoSo’s president, sophomore Derek Cutting, said while he is glad photography has become so accessible to the public, he is afraid this may bring down the general public’s opinion of photography as an art form.

“So many people now can take very-high quality photos without having to know much about cameras and the technical side,” he said. “People have this dysfunction that they think art needs to be difficult to create.”

Cutting uses not only a digital Rebel XT camera, but also a Minolta XG1 film camera, which he said he uses when he wants to hand-develop black-and white-photos, though he said developing colors in a darkroom is much more difficult. He likes the control hand-developing black-and-white offers, and the “personality” of it.

“Sometimes it has a better look if you develop them in the darkroom,” Cutting said. “It has a different grain.”

For people like sophomore Stephanie Cornthwaite, traditional film is still the medium of choice. Her 35 mm camera is, she estimated, about 30 years old. She develops her own film and, while she will sometimes scan her work into a computer, she rarely uses a digital.

“Everything I do is pretty much darkroom,” Cornthwaite said. “It feels more like my own work, I guess, if I use my own film camera.”

In fact, with the rise of digital cameras, finding developing chemicals has become more difficult and expensive, as they are no longer in high demand, Cornthwaite said.
And money is another argument for digital, Johantgen said.

“With digital cameras, you don’t even have to get them produced,” she said. “You can do this as a hobby and not spend a lot of money.”