Essay

Digital media put the tools of production into the hands of the everyday computer user making it incredibly easy to produce content. These creative skills used to be something that people worked to develop. Now it appears that amateurs can produce content of a fair standard within a relatively short period of time. Where does this leave 'professionals' and highly-skilled artists? Choose one area of creativity and discuss some of the challenges facing practitioners vs amateurs in producing digital content.

A field of digital media where technology has created tools to produce quality content with ease is the photographic areas. In previous years only the most educated and skilled photographers could create such beautiful images because of their expertise in knowing just what setting on the camera suited the settings that they were capturing. They were in touch with their cameras and understood exactly what every change to any setting made. Since technology has advanced it has opened up photography to so many more people, it has allowed the amateur photographer to produce professional standard photographs by taking advantage of these advancements in technology.

Such advancements in technology are the new features on cameras, the auto setting being the most commonly known and used feature which almost everyone today has their camera set on permanently because the camera itself reads the conditions and uses the most appropriate setting to capture the best image every time. there are also other features like the different scenes that you can select from which are already preset to take the image exactly the way you wish. for instance the night portrait setting which most new cameras have in their scene menu, in this setting the camera itself is preset to use a medium aperture and a low shutter speed with a fill flash so that the background is captured with the low light settings and the subject is illuminated with a soft flash so that both the background and the foreground are captured in harmony everytime. there is also settings like the sport or motion setting where a photographer would be capturing a fast moving image so the camera under this setting would automatically raise the ISO to let in more light so the aperture the aperture and shutter speed could be raised to extend the depth of field to keep all the image in focus and capture the fast moving image without motion blur. with these new settings on cameras it has made the task of getting everything right when taking a photograph almost too easy for any amature when only a few years ago only those educated and skilled in the photographic arts could dream of capturing these images

There are many other advancements in technology that have also made it much easier for amature photographers to produce content of a professional standard. Originally the photographer would have to take the perfect shot taking into account all the elements that affect the image, where as now days the images captured are usually edited before being produced, and that once itself was an art too where photographers would spend years learning and perfecting their editing skills to produce flawless images, now the programs have advanced so much that even the editing process has become automated. long gone are the days when edditing the levels on the images took a while to complete so that they all lived within the photograph in harmony, now there are automated functions in editing programs like the one Adobe Photoshop has where you can click a variety of auto edit function like 'Auto Levels' and the program analyses the image and adjusts the levels to make it most pleasing to view. this Advancement in technology is a brilliant thing for amatures as it is much easier and quicker for them to produce near professional standard content but where does it leave those photographers who understand every little function that the camera and the programs have but have amatures nipping at their heels when it comes to quality of work. The advancements in technology have opened up the would of professional photography to the abundance of amatures as it is now so easy and fast to produce professional work by hitting a few simple auto functions on your camera and in the edditing process

how does this leave those photographers feeling, who spent their lives understanding every little detail of the camera just to get that perfect shot. the advancement in technology has reduced the distance between being an amature and a professional photographer. the grandeur that photographers used to have when they captured an amazing image is gone, because now that ability to capture amazing photographs is open to everyone it stops being grand ability and just becomes the average