At this point of our story we have to make a little side trip to Menlo Park in New Jersey. Here Thomas Alva Edison when asked about a film size for the new motion picture camera that his engineers were developing, held his fingers apart and someone remarked that it was approximately 35mm in width. With that simple gesture the 35mm standard was established. Quickly moving to the motion picture film industry in Germany, a camera was developed to utilize 35mm motion picture film for still photography. Does the name Leica sound familiar? This 35mm format has become the prominent film format for most amateurs and professionals. Utilizing a mirror and a prism the single lens reflex camera was born allowing the photographer to view and focus through the actual lens taking the picture. As film became finer grained and more sensitive, camera makers were busy developing cameras that could read the amount of light on a subject and adjust the proper exposure, as well as automatically focusing the lens. Somewhere along the way film went from black-and-white to color negative as well. Two young men, musicians, in a darkroom/closet in the Bronx, NY, put their heads together and invented a color transparency film (Kodachrome), which today most people call slide film. This allows us to sit in a darkened room and with a slide projector throw images onto a far wall not unlike the early viewers of the camera obscura, though far more brilliant and sharply defined to be almost lifelike.

For the past one hundred years or so film was king, photography took many long strides forward as film and equipment reached the point of absolute perfection. There were high quality cameras that could fit in your shirt pocket, cameras with motor drives that could photograph eight to ten frames a second. Large format cameras with flexible bellows that allowed you to twist the lens and film plane's to achieve maximum distortion corrections and sharpness. Advanced equipment and lighting allowed photographing and stopping a bullet in flight as it punctures a balloon. The film of Mr. Eastman was improved on and improved on again. Small fine-grained negatives could be enlarged to gigantic proportions and maintain their sharpness.

Suddenly in the late 1980s as quickly as the computer displaced many things that we have taken for granted, such as the typewriter, architectural drawing, graphic design, spreadsheets, file maintenance, image manipulation, communications, law enforcement and just about anything else that touches our lives, digital photography was born kicking and screaming and looking to replace film as the medium for recording the photographic image.

Digital photography the new buzzword! In the photography world there are people marketing digital tripods, digital camera bags and even digital lighting systems. As long as the name "digital" is applied it makes the item up to date, cool and vital. What is digital photography? Basically it is the writing with light photography that those people who were sitting in the camera obscura saw. The optics, the focusing system as well as the exposure adjustments although improved, remain pretty much the same. Digital photography is the replacement of film as the medium for recording the image. Where light falling on a film plane created an electrochemical change in the Silver based emulsion to be developed later, light now falls on a silicone wafer containing millions of recording pixels that measure the intensity and the color of the light. A highly sophisticated miniature computer within the camera reads these individual points of information, processes it into numerical information and stores it on a recording device in the camera, where it is eventually downloaded for further use. Everything else is pretty much the same as using a film camera.

We are in the infancy of digital photography and have been for somewhat less than the last twenty years. Digital photography and digital cameras have advanced rapidly during this period of time. The advancement has been continuous and rapid improvements come along constantly. The ability to make an exposure, transfer it rapidly to a computer where digital imaging software is used to make corrections that reflect the insight of the photographer and then output to a printer for a final print is well within the grasp of everybody.

Good photography is now within everybody's grasp. The real differences in photography are not so much the equipment, which will only get better and better, but as it has always been, the differences that are in the eyes, imagination and passion of the person who is capturing the image are what count. So, make use of this new digital photography and its way of fixing images for the people in the next century and beyond to reflect upon. Think about the image, framing, focus, light, and from your distant caveman need to communicate, utilize the increasingly sophisticated digital systems for image capture. But always remember the history of photography, where we've been and where we are going, but most of all remember your grandfather.

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