A line from this reading that I really enjoyed is “As photography moves from the realm of the physical into the realm of the circuit, as photographs become nothing more than strings of numbers, the medium itself is transformed. This change represents more than just another stage in photography’s evolution… Thanks to digital technology, the boundaries of the photographic act, once quite clear are now shifting in unexpected and unrecognizable ways.” I thought this section was interesting because a lot of people believe that analog photography is dead because of the new digital age, but this line reinstates that analog photography is actually being helped. With the help of all of the new technology available today, the film camera can only be helped, due to the ability to scan, edit, and manipulate negatives in programs such as Photoshop.
Another section of the reading I found interesting was the part about Life magazine. The line in the book is “Life magazine, founded in 1936, owed its existence not only to new photographic and printing technologies, but also to the development of rail and trucking systems that made its economical to distribute the magazines once they were printed. Now, digital photographs can be sent over electronic networks at the speed of light, at virtually no cost, creating new audiences and uses.” I think this is an interesting statement because now we take the distribution of our photographs fro granted, but it can also be a bad thing. To share our images on social media, we are risking them being stolen or redistributed without us, the photographer’s’ consent or without receiving any compensation.
Cara McLaughlin Photography 