Digital Landscape Photography

Within a period of just a few years, digital photography has become the preferred medium of capture in photography for the massive majority of photographers from amateurs through to high ranking professionals. There are many reasons for this:

1. Convenience in being able to see results almost instantly
2. No lab processing costs nor delays
3. The ability to make on site corrections straight away if the results are not what was intended
4. Deleting unwanted images is just a push of a button
5. It provides photographers with almost complete control over their photography
6. Cameras have generally become very much smaller, lighter and cheaper
7. It has never been easier to share one’s images via the internet

Yet with all these advantages, landscape photography has also become more complicated in some ways. To be fully adept at being the complete photographer, one now has to also own a computer system for storage and processing of images, and to complete the picture, a printer also needs to be added to the setup in order to be able to print one’s images. So not only does one need to be able to operate his or her camera, one must also be prepared to learn how to use computer programs, and generally have some understanding about pixels, file sizes, cropping, sharpness, contrast, and general colour management. It has opened up whole new set of opportunities and/or problems for many people.

Although setting up for digital landscape photography is undoubtedly less expensive than using film in the long term, it is certainly more expensive in the initial setting up, particularly for the professional photographer, whose requirements will always be much more expensive than the average point and shoot amateur. Yet in the case of the professional digital photographer, the setting up costs are very quickly negated.

Some have argued for many years that digital results were not as good as images from film. Up until about as little as 3-4 years ago, this argument had a great deal of evidence to support it, yet today it has been proved fairly conclusively that at all levels from cameras available to the average person in the street, through to the highest quality professional cameras, digital photography has now taken the lead in quality. Never before has photography been at such a high universal standard. With all the auto everything on cameras today, in most cases it is difficult for people to take technically poor photos. Digital photography is much more forgiving than film ever was.

The downside to this rapidly advancing technology has been the speed of redundancy that has accompanied it. The ever increasing features and quality of capture has meant that cameras as little as 9-12 months old lose most of their value, simply because another newer model has come onto the market which is usually not only much better, but cheaper as well. In the days when film cameras were standard, one could be confident of a resale value that was the majority of what you spent on the camera even years earlier.