[Editor's Note: We're pleased to get a column from Mel Gross, recently retired master of many skills, A longtime Mac expert, member of the old NYMUG and now of MetroMac, Mel will serving up this column on a regular basis. Herewith, to bring novices up to speed, The Beginnings.

Hi, my name is Mel Gross, and I will be writing a column about digital photography. My aim is to help clear up most of the confusion that surrounds this new and exciting technology. In doing so, we will sometimes be ranging a distance from our subject in a direction that I hope will be seen to be useful to our understanding of it.

I will answer questions that are submitted to me in the column itself, but I will not recommend an individual camera here. I may not be able to answer all questions directly, but I will attempt to satisfy everyone, if only in a more general discussion. There are several fine digital photography sites, which I have listed at the end of the column. These review cameras, printers, and software. Some explain the technical aspects. They do a fine job, and reviews are beyond the scope of this column. Perhaps this might change later

The saga this far

I've been involved with photography since I first read Popular Photography while sitting in my dentist's office when I was about ten years old. I was fortunate that instead of reading golf magazines, he read electronics and photography magazines.

Dr. Kadner had a darkroom in the back, and that was where I was introduced to the art of the black-and-white print making process. This was very exciting, and when he lent me a camera, I became hooked.

When I was twelve, in 1962 my mother took me to 47th Street Camera (a walk up a set of dingy, dark stairs), and we bought my first "real" camera, a Miranda GT. I soon made my first color prints, using our foyer floor for the eleven processing trays. Boy, what a start!

Since that beginning, I've worked in photography in different ways. First in advertising and fashion, where I was lucky to work with some major talents. I also did the photography for my own company, Magnum Opus, which was an audio manufacturing company. Most of my time for the last twenty-five years, has been spent with New York Filmworks. This was a public company, so no one could be said to have owned it, but I ran it, along with my "partner". I am now happily retired (sort of), and have more time to devote to something I have not done much of in years—photography.

The photographic process as we know it will be two hundred years old before too long. Between the first photograph, which was barely decipherable, and the ones being made today, exists quite a gulf. However, the silver based photographic process is nearing the end of its existence.

Experts from Kodak, Agfa, and Fuji have all agreed, when asked by me, that film has gone about as far as it can. Some improvements can still be made, but the limits of the chemical-based process are looming. Now, due to the enormous costs of the R & D, most advances are, at best, being put on hold. Products are being discontinued at an ever-increasing pace. For every new film there are at least two being discontinued. There is now no way to print from a transparency other than from a scan. Well, there is, but not for quality usage.

Ten years ago we saw a seismic shift about to take place. Apple/Kodak introduced the digital Model 100. For $1,000 we could get a 640x480 binocular shaped camera with a fixed lens, and not much else. Feature set? I looked, but couldn't find one.

Nevertheless, this camera excited the public imagination, and was very popular.

Ten years later

Digital cameras have come a long way in ten years, and I now very rarely get the question, "But are they photo quality?" The public has decided. The answer is yes.

Of course, this revolution in picture taking would have taken a lot longer to reach this point if everything surrounding it hadn't also improved rapidly. Printers, along with the inks and papers for them, have improved significantly. Prices have dropped, and the feature set has expanded. What could be easier than dropping a memory card into a slot on the printer, selecting some images, pressing print, and walking away while your images are printed, cut, and deposited into a neat little pile? Computers as well have contributed to this paradigm change. The increase in power, memory, storage, graphics capability, and of course, software, has made it easy to manipulate and save images to CDs and now DVDs, including multiple backups (you do, don't you?).

What we struggled with in the darkroom can now be done easily in the light. But while those physical darkroom skills are no longer needed, the artistic senses are even more necessary now. The ability to control just about every parameter, every detail, has made the craft of printing even more demanding of the artistic, as well as the technical acuity of the printmaker. (David Em, a well known photographer has an excellent series of articles written for http://www.byte.com/ (sign-up required) that deals with this issue, as well as reviewing pocket-sized "point-and-shoots").

With the price of every aspect of digital photography rapidly descending to levels that challenge film, there is no longer any excuse to refuse to at least try it. Cameras that are dropping below $150 already offer 3 megapixels and a 3 times optical zoom. 1 gigabyte compact flash cards can be bought, on sale, for under $50. SD cards are not far behind. To put that in perspective, a 1-gig card, used with a 3 megapixel camera, shooting at the highest resolution, in the highest quality JPEC mode, can store over 700 images, or about 200 in RAW (the highest quality). Photo-quality printers can now be bought for under $99, and their print quality can rival that of traditional print methods.

In future columns, I hope to convince you that digital photography, or as I prefer to think of it, digital image-making, while capable of the highest professional quality, is interesting, easy, and most of all fun

Mel

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