Digital Photography

Digital photography uses an array of electronic photo detectors to capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The captured image is then digitized and stored as a computer file ready for digital processing, viewing, digital publishing or printing.

Until the advent of such technology, photographs were made by exposing light sensitive photographic film, and used chemical photographic processing to develop and stabilize the image. By contrast, digital photographs can be displayed, printed, stored, manipulated, transmitted, and archived using digital and computer techniques, without chemical processing.

Digital photography is one of several forms of digital imaging. Digital images are also created by non-photographic equipment such as computer tomography scanners and radio telescopes. Digital images can also be made by scanning other photographic images.

The art and science of producing and manipulating digital photographs -- photographs that are represented as bit maps. Digital photographs can be produced in a number of ways:

·         Directly with a digital camera

·         By capturing a frame from a video

·         By scanning a conventional photograph

Once a photograph is in digital format, you can apply a wide variety of special effects to it with image enhancing software. You can then print the photo out on a normal printer or send it to a developing studio which will print it out on photographic paper.

Although the resolution of digital photos is not nearly as high as photos produced from film, digital photography is ideal when you need instant, low-resolution pictures. It's especially useful for photos that will be displayed on the World Wide Web because Web graphics need to be low resolution anyway so that they can be downloaded quickly.