November 3, 2005

F or the older generation, photography is still a multi-step process. Buy the roll of film, load it, click photographs and send it. But for the younger generation, the whole process is: snap, and watch.

Walking down the congested, suffocating alleys of the electronic market in Saddar, Karachi, one sees a digital revolution in process. Gadgets with the plug-and-play abilities hang from the windows of one-man operated cabins, popularly referred to as shops. And of all the gadgets that are fast catching the people’s imagination, digital cameras top the list.

Available today in all shapes, sizes and prices, the digital camera has given a boom to the art of photography like its predecessor could never manage. After all, in the film roll-based camera, you had to go to the developing centre to see what you actually captured on the film roll. Though most of the times the image that had been captured came out fine, a number of times what you captured would be blurry and forgettable at best. But by that time, the film had been developed, and thus wasted.

But photography has come a long way from what it was a century ago. From dusty family albums to record rooms in government departments, photographs had taken shelves upon shelves of memories. Just when you thought that we were going to run out of space to store memories of any kind, in comes the digital age with its own array of gadgets, including the camera.

Digital photography

Unlike the conventional method involving the film roll, digital photography is a method of making images. And instead of saving the picture to be developed later, it is saved in the camera; the visual information being converted into a series of ones and zeroes that a computer can read. The advantage that a digital camera has over the film roll is that you can see the picture on a small display screen on the camera, thus giving you the power to delete the picture if you don’t like it.

But it does not end there. Once saved, photographs in the digital form can be manipulated by means of various computer programs. Probably that is why the professional users of photography were the first to embrace digital photography. Advertising agencies, graphic designers and even photo-journalists have now accepted it.

Until five years ago, digital photography was in its infancy. The digital cameras were viewed more as gizmos than professional instruments. Photographs were limited and were saved on a diskette and imbedded in a slot within the camera.

However, the digital cameras today are capable of functioning as effectively as the conventional 35-millimetre camera since the pixel has become the byword in photography. There can be several million pixels in a high-resolution, full-colour digital photograph.

And yet, there are not that many neighborhoods in the country that can boast of digital cameras. The reason being its exorbitant price. Even today, a basic conventional camera can be bought for as low as Rs999, whereas the basic starting price for a reasonable digital camera is Rs4500.

These are the amateur cameras that function as point-and-shoot cameras, with automatic focus, automatic exposure and built-in electronic flash. Pictures from these cameras contain fewer pixels than those from a more expensive camera and, therefore, the final product is not as sharp.

However, Adnan, a dealer in digital cameras, contends that the level of awareness that would drive hordes of consumers to buy camera isn’t there. “Most people still think that the web camera is also the digital camera. They fail to realize that the two are different things. At the same time they want a camera that has an LCD display, make also makes a movie and is for Rs1,000 or less.

The market is in transition. Where the people are price conscious, they are also ego and pride conscious. They all want to show off their digital cameras.”

He also claims that the need for a digital camera is all part of the digital era. With computer now an important part of the household, the word digital has, in a way, become a brand name; everything has to be digital, thus the digital camera.

Meeting such customer demands is indeed an impossible task. According to Adnan, almost all the low-end digital cameras in the Pakistani market are coming from Chinese mass production factories. “They have the model of a basic digital camera and are churning it out in large numbers.

“For the past two years I have been selling cameras that are simply called the Snapshot. There’s nothing wrong with them and for the price that they are being sold at. They are good for any occasion, but when people find out that they have been manufactured in China, they ask for some other brand.” He goes on to point out that cameras have become more customer-friendly with each new model bringing with it some added features.

“There are cameras now that have touch screen facilities, where you don’t need to download the photograph onto a computer to edit it; it can be done on the camera via the display and a stylus. There are now cameras that also have an MP3 player. The size is also shrinking and the slimmest camera in the market is less than an inch thick. New and more features are making inroads shaping the digital camera into something more than just a simple camera. And yet, people come to our shop looking for the cheapest solution, not the best solution that is according to their needs. My experience in the market tells me that the camera is still an accessory, not a necessity.”

Digital photography has come a long way in the last few years. Making minor changes to a photograph, with the intention of improving it, is simplified by using a computer. Terms like shutter speed and aperture have been joined by white balance, colour correction and sharpening. With the help of Photoshop, photographs can now be made to look better and what with prices of colour printers reducing, you can even take out prints of your own. Hence, no need to go to the photo developer.

Digital camera and photography is here to stay. It’s knocking at our doors. But it still has miles to go before it can attain the heights of success that conventional photography has. So, even though family photo album is going to be there for ever and ever, the next generation is going to have hard disks full of digital photos that will reside in shared folders and crisscross the internet via emails.

The writer is a freelance contributor