The noughties and the age of photographic digitisation

Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer

It may have been 1993, when American photojournalists got their hands on the Digital Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera in large numbers, but it was way back in 1973 that the technology was created by Kodak in Rochester, New York.

Kodak’s body was big and scary enough to put any professional ill at ease. This, however, was the R&D model and nowhere near what it would look like when it entered mass production.

The first commercial digital SLR (Kodak DCS-100) was launched in 1991, it had a modified Nikon F3 SLR body, a modified drive unit with an external storage unit connected via a cable, and a 1.3 megapixel that cost a whopping $30,000.

Through the decade (1990 to 1999) numerous players jumped into the digital photography market: Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax, Fuji to name a few. But in 1999, it was Nikon that took the lead with the launch of the Nikon D1, which marked the beginning of the end of the film camera era (I was very lucky to have used the D1 in its launch year during my stint with a newspaper in North India, though it was only meant for very important assignments).
In India, forward-thinking newspapers — which up until than had been using negative scanners or print scanners for pictures to be digitally transferred on to their Quark pages — grabbed at this opportunity by ensuring that their respective photo departments went digital. But it was only in mid-2002, when Nikon launched the D-100, that the death rattle of film, turned into rigor mortis.

Newspapers that hadn’t cottoned onto the virtues of digital photography now swiftly converted to D-SLR in the hope that by cutting down on film purchase and printing they would in turn cut overall costs. It worked, and the shift would become a pivotal moment in the publishing industry.

But with the invasion of technology into the artistic field came with it a crisis of ethics and photography took a hammering. Images started appearing having been digitally manipulated to catch the viewer’s eye.

Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer. Take for instance some of the recent images taken after the advent of D-SLR and Adobe’s Photoshop; an increasing number of manipulated pictures have started to find space on magazine covers, in newspapers and on wire services.

But ethics in photography is a whole other column