ABSTRACT
or the past couple of decades, digital photography has been by far the most popular visual medium. But the way we capture the images has changed. This chapter looks back at the history of photography from its camera obscura analog beginnings, through the advent of digital photography, and into the current state of the medium. Light-field photography, lens-less cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) software are some of the newer innovations that are starting to play major roles in the future direction of image capture. These advancements change the way a digital image is captured, processed and shared. So, exactly what is a digital image? It is a numerical representation of a two-dimensional image. The smallest element of the image, the pixel (derived from picture element), holds the values that represent the brightness of a color at any specific point on the image. Thus, the digital image is a file that contains information in the form of numbers. The way we capture this information, the software processes that can be applied to it, the way we share it, and future trends in the industry are explored in this chapter.
