Design Project Proposal – Intentions & Positions

The design goal intends to address the emergence of technology and it affects on the subject area.  Contemporary digital photography has transformed or redefined the realm of the photographic darkroom into the light and the medium for processing has warranted a paradigm shift.  This shift may be new to the instructor, but some may argue that the learner have never known a world of film or darkroom photography.  The normalcy may offer an advantage to students, in that their computer skills may be an added benefit to the course, but one cannot assume that the students are competent or comfortable with the computer as a learning tool even though they are proficient with using the computer as a communicative tool.  As such, time must be taken to bring a standard level of competency early in the course.

We hope to accomplish a confidence within these students to use their developed and/or refined skill set in taking a picture or creating art with a DSLR.  This design will hopefully provide a broad learning experience from different environments; thus, giving them the mindset of how to shoot in other situations (new or old) they may encounter in the future.  However, the counter-argument would be that the student would lose interest in trying to obtain and/or improve this skill set because of various reasons such as: too challenging, too expensive, too much traveling; too much time needed to be invested; too much energy used in setting up the photographic endeavor; etc. Maybe the counter-argument can be the question of – “Is my pursuit of learning digital photography a hobbyist’s passion or a vocational one?

The primary technology used will include digital single lens reflex cameras, computers, and Internet.

According to Wikipedia (History of DSLRs, 2009), here is a brief history of how the DSLR came to be:

On August 25, 1981 Sony unveiled a prototype of the first still video camera.  This camera was an analog electronic camera that featured interchangeable lenses and a SLR viewfinder.  At Photokina in 1986, Nikon revealed a prototype analog electronic 35 mm SLR camera, the Nikon SVC, a predecessor to the DSLR.

In 1991, Kodak released the first commercially available DSLR.  This 1.3 megapixel camera costed approximately US$30,000. 

Over the next decade, DSLRs have been released by various companies, including Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic, Samsung, Minolta, Sony, Fujifilm, and Sigma, with higher resolutions and lower prices.

In 1999, Nikon announced the Nikon D1, the first DSLR to truly compete with, and begin to replace, film cameras in the professional photojournalism and sports photography fields. At that time, this camera was able to use current autofocus Nikon lenses and was also able to utilize the older Nikon and similar lenses designed for those cameras. A combination of price, speed, and image quality was the beginning of the end of 35mm film for these markets.

In 2003, Canon introduced the 6.3 megapixel EOS 300D SLR camera with an MSRP of US$999, directed at the consumer market. Its popularity encouraged other manufacturers to produce affordable DSLR cameras, lowering entry costs and allowing more amateur photographers to purchase DSLRs.