Digital Photography Digital photography, which is also called ‘digital imaging’ since it does not involve the use of film started in the sixties. The original development of the technology is at NASA when they required that exploration spacecraft, unable to return to earth, to be capable of sending back pictures of their voyages. The digital camera, like the standard film camera, uses a lens to focus the image on a sensor. The usual film camera depends on a film to capture the image but the digital relies on a sensor, either CCD or CMOS . As light hits the pixels that make up the sensor, it is converted to a current that is then sent to the ‘Analogue to Digital Converter’ or A-D converter. When a photo is digitised, its colours are sampled from the sensor and converted to binary format. The smallest image element sampled is called a pixel. The digital image is like a map, where the information about the colour value of a pixel is understood as co-ordinates on the map. When the map is converted back to an image, the pixel goes to its position and colour in relation to the other pixels making up the image and the co-ordinates given to it. From the A-D converter, algorithms are then applied to the data converting it into a digital image. Sometimes, the
