Wedding Photographers in Cornwall Blog

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Just a very few years ago, the majority of professional photographers did all of their work on film but, over the past decade, there has been a move towards digital cameras. Is this a good move or does the quality of the final result suffer? It’s the  new versus old technology arguement and there are always going to be people who swear by film and will never entertain the tought of changing, but from my experience there is only one winner – and that’s digital, and at  Iconik-photography our photographers use exclusively digital single lens reflex cameras  (DSLRs) for our wedding photography.

So what’s the difference between film and digital cameras?

When photography first became popular,  the earliest cameras used glass plates coated in a light sensitive emulsion to capture the image. These were large and very fragile and required the photographer to process the plates in a series of chemicals to fix the image. The Euipment was cumbersome and the plates took a long time to expse so Wedding photography at this time usually consited of a few formal shots often in a studio.. not exactly spontaneous.

In 1884 George Eastman developed a dry gel on paper film which meant that photographers no longer needed to carry around the fragile glass plates and chemicals, and in 1888 Eatman released the first Kodak camera with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. This opened up photography to a whole new group of people and 1901 saw the release of the legendary Kodak Box Brownie which introduced photography to the mass market. In 1925 Leica introduced the 35mm camera which beacme the standard format for photojournalists and this format remained the preferred format for the majoritry of camera and film manufacturers right up until recent years.

In a digital camera, instead of the light from the lens being focussed on photo sensitive film which then has to be  chemically developed, it is focussed onto a lightsensitive digital sensor. This information is then stored digitally onto a flash memory card as a file which can  be transferred easily and  directly onto a computer for viewing, adjusting and printing.

The first foray into digital photography came with the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD) in 1969, but it was quite a while before digital cameras became comercially available and even longer before they started appearing in the hands of the serious photographer. The first digitals were low resolution and compared unfavourably to the clarity and definition available on film. When enlarged digital photographs soon started to show pixelation (everything looked like it was made of lego!)  and the images lacked the quality achievable on film.  Digital technology has moved ahead in leaps and bounds over the past few years and it was Kodak again that developed the first real megapixel sensor. These days  even consumer level cameras are reaching resolutions of 15 mega pixels and over. The number of  mega pixels relates to the level of detail that a camera can achieve, so the higher the number the better the definition – 15 megapixels equals 15 million pixels… that a lot of detail. That might not seem signifigant but when it comes down to getting high quality images it is a major factor. It was when the big camera players like Canon and Nikon started to produce digital versions of their SLR cameras that things really started hotting up and, with the combination of high quality lenses and camera build with ever increasing levels of resolution, digital photography finally started to be taken seriously .