Making Up With Digital Photography

SOFIA, Bulgaria- For many years I harbored a complete distain for digital photography. Digital photography killed film as a mass-consumer medium. Digital photography killed Kodak and my father’s job and the swath of the globe that I call home.

I come from a place that was built on film.

To my credit, in the early days digital cameras were awful. They’d take ten seconds to boot up and another five seconds after you pushed the shutter button to actually take each photo. I found them unusable for travel photography — by the time they’d be ready to shoot something it would already be gone.

I stuck to film for as long as I could … well, until I started blogging seriously and realized that I wasn’t going to go through the arduous process of both developing and scanning my photos. That was in 2005, and while digital cameras were not very good then they were at least functional — and the ability to publish and distribute photos via this blog almost instantly was a major point in its favor.

It’s the later half of the 2010s now and digital photography has gotten to a level that I would describe as incredible. The cameras are as fast and the image quality and feel — while not approaching that of film — is still adequate.

I gave in bought my first mirrorless digital camera at the end of last summer and decided to treat digital photography with a little more respect.

After all, the technology was first invented in my hometown.