Within my lifetime, I have seen three of the greatest changes to photography: film to digital, the Internet, and cell phones. The first, moving from film to digital, is often considered the greatest change, although I disagree. Personally, I think it is the now the lessor of the three, even though it was the foundation for the other two. Digital brought photography to the masses, realistically, for the first time in history. All you needed to have was an initial investment, and ironically, use existing investments such as your PC and printer that you purchased for other purposes. The taxing price of developing film, and the even more costly printing of images, even a single set of small 4x6 prints per roll, suddenly disappeared. Then the Internet came along, and although pre-dating the digital photography era, stepped in and took digital photography to an entirely new level, far out-stripping the impact of the digital image on its own right. Suddenly, those digital images that were just a novelty, became an explosion of unexpected proportions, and definitely changing the entire world, all within a few seconds of each image. Services like facebook and twitter suddenly made the world a single global population, almost that feared single NWO (New World Order (NSA, please ignore that comment, lol)). In 1963, the assassination of JFK took a day or two for our own national newspapers acquire, days for the images to trickle out to the other nations, and weeks or even months for the more remote locales. Now, millions of people can view a pic or vid within seconds or minutes of a catastrophe, murder, robbery, hazing, fire, tornado, assassination, attack on a mall in Africa, etc., etc... The third, and what I suspect will eventually be recognized as actually the biggest recent change and paradigm shift in photography, is the cell phone camera. What I would give to be the person who thought of putting a phone in a camera, and more importantly patenting it (huge miss there). Just imagine going back 100 years and trying to tell the masses that my children, starting at the age of 8, would have a wireless telephone with a camera that takes better pics than the current era and able to send them to everyone they know, and unfortunately dont know, in just a few seconds. They would have looked at me like Im crazy. But with the ever increasing power of cell phone cameras, coupled with high-speed data to/from the Internet, cell phones are in fact changing the world in politics, education, emergencing handling, entertainment, and in so many other ways, faster than any other technology, by far. Every month seems to produce a better cell camera, some of them now attempting to rival the better point and shoots. I cant imagine what the next evolution or revolution in photography will be, but there definitely will be another, and many more to come. If I live another 50 years, I fear that I will be too old and feeble minded to even comprehend the cutting edge technologies, not because Ill be dumb per se, but solely based on what each aging generation encounters today. Luckily, even my parents generation has readily adapted to modern technology, but my late grand-parents struggled with even racial equality since they were born and raised in the 1910s and 1920s, so computers and the Internet were literally beyond their comprehension, no joke in their 90s. Personally, I think a good next-step would be to create swappable cameras in cell phones! Are you listening Apple??? Way too many people would gladly pay $50 or even $100 to replace their camera component in a $500+ cell phone. Another great improvement would be the ability to swap out or upgrade the processor and sensor in our very expensive DSLRs. I would love to pay $1000 to swap out and update the sensor in my $6000 D3s! Modularity should be a great consideration for the future. My reasoning behind this is the now VERY common habit of waiting and skipping a generation in technology before upgrading. Unless you can or want to afford the constant and expensive rat-race, it usually makes sense to skip a gen to maximize your investments in technology, especially when you can still accomplish what you really need, and usually want, out of each particular investment. Incremental modular upgrades just makes plain economic sense for both the consumer and manufacturer. How many of you right now would pay 25% of a new phone to upgrade the internal camera, or even better, upgrade the cell component from 3G to 4G or LTE? I would, but thats just me. Im from a tech network and server background, where modular upgrades are always preferable to an entire system upgrade where applicable. With tech getting smaller and faster, things will continue to change and grow. Ive seen a keyboard that can roll up and even a proto-type television screen on a flexible clear sheet, again being able to roll up...cool. I can imagine a day when I can buy a TV/Camera/Phone (TCP? LOL), which folded up would act like a phone and be the same size, unfold it two or three times and its a larger tablet, and maybe even unfold it even more until it is a 17 or 21 television/monitor, WITH cellular and WiFi connection to watch our television, eMail, YouTube and Facebook, as we want/need. Who knows... Only time will unveil.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:04:59 +0000
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