Digital & Film photography History - Understand the Basics of Photography

1. How does a camera work?

In this article, we will talk about how the camera actually works. And I think this is a really important lesson to learn and the starting point for the rest of this photography course.

It is important to start with film camera, because that’s where photography all started, so if you look at the photo above, you can see that you have the lens, where you have a way to control the amount of light entering, Above you have two sets for Shutter Speed and ISO Rating, and then the photo button, for unlock the magic of this tool and take pictures.

The important thing to understand about FILM camera is that in the back of it there are no electronics, but you have a piece of film going across, and you control the amount of light that enter into it through the lens using the shutter speed and the F-Stop; basically you control how much light hits the film, and the film itself is actually a light-sensitive source.

What make films really interesting is that this piece of films are actually a bunch of crystals, and those crystals are sensitive to light, actually they react when they are exposed to light, and whatever comes in it burned onto them and then saved for later; And you have to go through a whole chemical process to keep that exposed image on your film, and that ultimately what would create a negative out of and what you would go and print a photo form.

FILM photography is a different world than Digital photography, but it is very important to understand how photography work, and how much light is important, so you have some apparatus that controls the amount of light entering and then you have a plane or a piece of film that reacts to that light and stores the image.

Digital photography is very similar to film in the sense that you have a lens, you have the shutter, these things are controlling the amount of light, you also have the ISO Rating, but instead of having a piece of film back in the camera, you have a digital sensor, and that digital sensor read how much light is coming in. Now it’s still reacting to light, it’s just instead of physical-chemical process, you have a computer processing that image.

You can clearly see in the last few years how far that technology’s come because you’re able to capture pretty stunning images through digital photography, and a lot of traditionalists will say that film was always superior to digital, just because of the quality and the real chemical process that film goes through is considered just as high quality.

Digital has come along way, and most people can’t even tell the difference, but a lot of great photographers were a real artist because they weren’t using digital where you can't change so much after the fact. They were shooting a film and it was a whole process going into the dark room and exposing your film and the possibility that if you screwed up along the way, you lost everything, you lost all of your images. And sure that is possible in the digital world, maybe you drop your memory card, water gets on your camera, but it’s a lot more difficult nowadays to lose your images than the guys who were dealing with big old film cameras.

Another big difference is that all film cameras have different amount of crystals in the film, and that would determine an ISO Rating, while the digital sensor can read millions of pixels (1 & 0 that are creating the image you’re looking at), and how that ship or how that sensor reads light will make a huge difference in your photography, this is constantly changing, this is something really exciting when talking about what some full frame sensors are able to do nowadays.

But a lot of people will still say that film was able to do a lot more and there’s just a different quality to film photography over digital.

2. Inside the Film & Digital Camera: Shutter & sensors 

Now that we’ve gone over some of the types of cameras out there, let’s dive into the camera itself.

We are not going to be talking so much about the lens right now, but more so what’s “inside this camera”, so we will cover what you can found in both cameras film and digital which is the shutter and the sensor.

The shutter is a key part in controlling the amount of light that comes through your lens and hits your sensor, and ultimately what it is doing, is moving up and down very quickly and that’s establishing how much light is allowed in to expose on your film or sensor; In some cameras you go up to 1000 of a second exposure and its ultra-fast.

The sensor or film frame is how much light you can capture based on the size of the sensor you have; So there is a really big difference here because when you looking at something like 70mm VS 35mm VS 16mm VS 8mm film you can see the size difference. And that the same thing when you go into digital photography, you have a full frame sensor VS APS-C VS Mirco four thirds; all these sensors allow you to capture light but each has its own limitation; So a full frame sensor camera is going to be able to capture a lot more light than a smaller micro 4/3, just because it’s large.

It is important to understand what inside your camera because this will affect how you control light, what type of camera lenses you put on your camera.

There are many things that going around the camera in terms of different setting, and all that type of stuff, but when you talk about what’s inside the camera, so those are some key parts to focus on, so now after we understand what is inside the camera, let’s talk about what we will get from that camera.

3. File Formats – RAW VS JPEG

We’ve seen the different camera types and what’s going inside the camera (shutter, sensor), now I want to tell you a little about what happens next and file formats, how is that picture actually saved.

There is a couple of factors which file formats you would choose to save to, one of them is RAW, and this is introducing some fairly complex things because RAW is uncompressed, and really when you think of file formats you need to think about compression, because this is going to be how is the computer inside your camera changing the image that you’re taking, because what uncompressed means is that all the data that the sensor’s ability to save is being in a very big file.

Typically the reason that you would choose RAW is that you want to do some color correcting or maybe you want to zoom in a little bit on the image you’ve taken. You will have a lot more information when using RAW.

JPEG is a file that is more compressed, you’ll be able to take a lot more photos because it doesn’t take up as much space on your memory card, but you also lose some information, your shadows and your highlights, which means that you are going to have just less space to work with.

When I use RAW and when I use JPEG formats:

I want to introduce you to RAW VS JPEG compression and how that affects your images; So when talking about  file formats, typically you’re talking about RAW and JPEG, the main difference is being that RAW takes up more space, JPEG takes up less space, so when you travelling maybe you want to take more JPEG images, but ultimately if you want to be doing  some of that tweaking in post you’ll need that RAW images just because there’s so much data there.

There is a lot of information when it comes to photography whether it’s how the camera works, how it is saving the files and what you do whit those files.

RAW	JPEG
UNCOMPRESSED	COMPRESSED
Lossless data	Smaller size
Higher dynamic range	higher contrast, sharper, lower dynamic range
lower contrast	Ready to print, post, share
Not as sharp	Not as editable
Needs processing	X

4. THE POWER OF SHOOTING IN RAW REVEALED

With a Raw file and Adobe Lightroom, you can boost the shadow, because you have all the information just as if you are on the scene and taking another version of the photo again and again.

You can go from a very bad overexposed photo RAW version, to a somehow usable photo.

In the Next lesson we will cover everything about Focus (AF,MF), how to understand it right, use it right, and unlock your creativity to make a stunning photos.