Unknown photographer – pool at Banff Springs Hotel ca. 1928, The Image Centre
Toronto. Digital photographers – pro or amateur – use a camera with a digital sensor to capture images and a computer to save, adjust (develop), and print the images. In ‘film’ days, a ‘film’ camera used metal plates, glass plates, paper, or film to capture the photograph, then developed the ‘negative’ (sensitive media) and (if not a daguerreotype or tintype, etc.) either contact printed or enlarged the ‘negative’ onto sensitized paper to create a photograph.
For a brief period of time between film and digital (transition), a ‘film’ camera took the negative (digital cameras were low resolution and/or very expensive), and the negative or a print was scanned into a computer for photoshopping and printing.
Nowadays digital cameras have far higher resolution and are relatively lower in cost. But what about archives full of old negatives, prints and ephemera? Traditional scanning to get the archive content online was rather tedious and slow. New scanners and AI can now scan an image a SECOND making the transfer of archival content to online (with less handling of delicate items) practical.
Canadian photographer, Edward Burtynsky, has helped with an ARKIV360 scanner. One of many articles online at the moment on the scanner and its effect is this one by TMU (Ryerson) gallery called The Image Centre (IMC). Well worth the read.
My thanks to George Dunbar for telling me about this interesting story of how we can move photographic history (film data, prints, etc.) to the modern digital era.
