Photography has gone digital

One of my 200-plus photos taken last weekend

On a two-day trip to Colonial Williamsburg last weekend, I took more than 200 photographs. My wife, using another camera, took another 200-plus photographs. Even in a place like Williamsburg, where everyplace you turn is pretty as a picture, that's a lot of pictures. It's the equivalent, I quickly calculated, of about a dozen 20-exposure rolls of film each. Needless to say, I have never shot a dozen rolls of film in a weekend, or even in a week, in the nearly 50 years that I've been taking pictures with some degree of seriousness. The most pictures I ever shot during a one-week vacation was probably two rolls — 40 pictures — which seemed like an extravagance at the time.

Our experience testifies to the revolution in photography wrought by digital cameras. Shooting a dozen rolls of film would have cost me about $40 to $50 in film alone. Add processing and printing at about $5 to $10 a roll, and our photography alone would have exceeded our lodging and food costs for the weekend. Only the wealthiest photographers could afford such extravagance. But with digital photography, a single image is essentially "free," once you've paid for the camera and the memory card. If you want prints from your photographs, that will cost you 20 or 30 cents each, but, like most digital photographers, we rarely make prints from our images. If we want to view our pictures, we simply queue them up on the computer, which stores several thousand images (backed up on an external hard drive and on CDs). Furthermore, the programmed exposure and autofocus capabilities built into digital cameras allow even unskilled photographers to match the best efforts of professional photographers working with manual exposure and focus.

This revolution has taken place exceedingly fast. In the mid- to late-1990s, I did a story for the newspaper about digital photography (I searched for this article before I left the paper but never found it in the flawed filing system). At the time, the Associated Press was touting its new $25,000 digital cameras in the hands of a handful of photographers. These pioneering cameras, based on a Nikon F, weighed about 20 pounds and had lower resolution than today's cheap pocket digitals. The photographers and camera sales people I talked to at the time all agreed that digital photography would grow but never displace film, which had far better resolution and archival capabilities. Within five years, my newspaper had bought its first digital camera at a cost of about $5,000. You can buy a better version of that camera now for 10 percent of that price, and the paper soon after switched from point-and-shoot film cameras to cheap digitals that cost less than $200 each (now even cheaper).

It's no wonder, then, that digital photography became a tsunami that swamped film photography. A friend recently told me that she had several rolls of exposed but undeveloped film in her home. I advised her to get the film developed as soon as possible. Kodak has already quit making Kodachrome film — the staple of color photography for 75 years — and it seems likely that developing chemicals will soon be withdrawn from the market. The film processing kiosks and in-store desks that made film processing so convenient and cheaper cannot last much longer. In another generation, people will be unable to understand why my generation and our parents' generation took so few pictures to chronicle our daily lives. After all, it's nothing to shoot a few hundred pictures in one weekend.