How digital technology makes almost everyone a photographer
How technology turned almost everyone into photographers practically overnight
There was recent news that one of the world's weirdest and most groundbreaking camera systems, Lytro, had become even weirder and more groundbreaking thanks to the addition of new software effects.
The Lytro captures an "image field" - with not just the colours and intensity typical of cameras, but also the directions light rays are travelling. This made it possible to view an image on screen and choose which part to snap into focus. As if this wasn't weird enough, you can now also use a mouse to wiggle the contents of an image around as if moving your head left, right, up and down while viewing an actual scene.
By capturing images that till recently were only possible with experimenters' arrays of perhaps a hundred cameras, the Lytro is almost the stuff of science fiction. But for something else that would have seemed astonishing just a few years ago, consider how many of us have a pocket-sized smartphone equipped with a multi-megapixel camera.
The explosive growth of digital photography has surprised not only laymen, but also some people involved in its development. Steve Sasson, a Kodak engineer credited with creating the world's first digital camera in 1975, has reported that he and his colleagues were only looking at it as akin to proof of concept, with real world application a distant possibility.
Kodak was then a major company, which had achieved early success through introducing a film camera costing one US dollar in 1900. Film was a core business, and Sasson did not enthuse managers by giving internal presentations titled "filmless photography".
That first camera adopted some of the technology that Nasa had developed for transmitting images from the moon. During the 1960s, Nasa engineers working on the idea of using mosaics of photosensors to create digital images coined the term "pixel" as shorthand for picture element.
CCDs - charge coupled devices - were the main kinds of early sensors, and are still in use today. Each is made from layers including semiconductor and metal oxide. When a pixel is hit by photons, electrons are released, and their charge is later transferred from the sensor, resulting in voltage used for building the digital image. Light from across the spectrum can release electrons, and arrays of filters create colour images, ensuring each pixel responds only to red, green or blue.
