By David Saffir

I just finished teaching the three-day Imagemaking for Photographers workshop on the Central Coast of California. Our students included a mix of professionals and serious amateurs. Skill levels ranged from many years of experience with digital to “I bought this thing (a digital SLR) three months ago, and….”

We performed our field work in a number of environments under a variety of conditions. We shot at night, at pre-dawn twilight, in full sunlight, at sunset, and in canyons in deep shade. We shot still life, landscapes, and wildlife. We supplemented the field work with midday classroom sessions on camera setup, image preparation and correction, and printing.

Several things greatly impressed me during the seminar. First, the knowledge level of photographers is not only improving steadily, but the tempo of this growth is noticeably faster. I believe this can be attributed largely to the rise of social networks on the Web and increasingly easy Internet communications. For example, automated feeds from blogs such as this one have streamlined my daily reading. This has given me time to do other things (like shoot!).

Something else that struck me was that the newer DSLR cameras are extremely well made and produce images of extraordinary quality. Plus, they are much easier to use. Shooting at high ISO, cameras from both Canon and Nikon handled noise issues very well, including low light and night photography. Many of the students own these cameras.

The improvements in the cameras, along with parallel improvements in software such as Adobe Camera RAW, make it pretty straightforward for any photographer to shoot RAW and like it. Not one photographer in the class was using JPEGs. All saw the RAW file format as an advantage—both in image quality and creative options in image development.

Last, but not least, I was impressed by how far printing technology has come. In the workshop, we used HP Photosmart Pro B9180 printers. Images printed on a variety of media showed excellent color rendering, shadow and highlight detail, and dimensionality.

What I find most exciting is that the combination of these improvements in digital imaging hardware and software has made it far easier for photography students to concentrate on creativity-exploring ideas, and producing images that speak from the heart. As I saw for myself, this remarkable progress beyond the early technological hurdles of digital photography isn’t just a theory—it’s real.