Although the raw technology of digital photography has been around for many years (the CCD sensor dates back to 1969), photographers were still using film until the beginning of the millennium.
Why didn't digital make it's mark before then? Video production digital CCD's were already being used with media however these sensors didn't offer a quality high enough when taking still shots to compete with your standard roll of 35mm film.
Although in this day and age digital cameras have increased their quality immensely (through megapixel size) film still offers a larger print size and greater sharpness than a professional digital camera.
Digital cameras have become far more popular regardless as they now offer competitive quality, an immense amount of features and by eliminating the need for film they have also become far more convenient as well.
One of the greatest positives about digital photography is the ability to upload photos to your computer and post-process them.
Film was always an expensive accessory and a sensitive one as well, amateur photographers weren't able to develop film in a garage as a darkroom was required, or a third-party to do the developing.
With the capability to post-process at home opened up a whole new world of photography where your average photographer could take thousands of photos, which then saved to a digital SD card, followed by eliminating the photos of an unacceptable standard and then editing the remaining photos with the potential to sharpen, alter contrasts, show highlights and even make spot fixes to areas such as where dust may have settled on the camera lens or remove rubbish which was sitting upon the ground.
Another useful feature which has evolved from digital photography is called High Dynamic Range, often abbreviated as HDR.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is a recently discovered offspring of digital photography.
To explain, an HDR image is the result of combining three photos, each of a different contrast including high, medium and low or dark, normal and light.
The reason that this is such a powerful technique is that a normal photograph loses much detail from the amount of light allowed to reach the sensor.
For example, should a photographer be shooting a shadowed area on a bright, sunny day then the digital camera must choose whether to underexpose the brightness, causing the shadows to underexpose as well or overexpose the shadows causing blown highlights from the sunny areas.
HDR in this instance is an obvious solution, being able to merge the three light amounts into one photo.
So the theory is easy but how does one achieve this? It's actually quite simple, all that is required is a camera which can shoot in raw and of different contrasts, a tripod and some computer software.
Step 1: Attach your camera to the tripod Step 2: switch it to raw mode Step 3: Take 3 photos - one in each contrast Step 4: Return to your computer and load your preferred HDR capable software.
Step 5: Post process the image within the software Step 6: Make finer adjustments with another program such as Photoshop.
That's all there is to it! If you are an amateur photographer then you will be amazed at the amount of attention any photo produced in HDR will receive.