Modern Landscape Photography. The Opportunities of the Digital Revolution

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics - English - Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Würzburg (Neuphilologisches Institut), course: Photography in America, language: English, abstract: Over the course of the last years photography in general changed quite rapidly and starkly. In the beginning it was considered a new form of art, which obviously still is meaningful today, but also photography for non-art-related purposes becomes more and more common. Everyday photography as for example holiday pictures for remembering became even more widely spread, when digital photography was introduced. Not only the easier handling of a digital compared to an analog camera is a reason for the expansion of digital photography, another main issue of analog photography was the development of the pictures as well as the constant costs of films to put in the camera. With digital photography on the rise also more and more programs to edit and alter pictures popped up in the photography scene. The most prominent of these programs are probably Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. They give the user lots of possibilities to adjust coloring, light, shadows, brightness and other characteristics of photographic images. In this work a picture taken in the Monument Valley in Utah, USA in the year 2011 will be edited in several ways and it will be discussed, how these changes make different interpretations of these pictures possible, even though the original is the same with all used examples. This will lead to a further thinking about how photography changed from showing a picture of the world as it is in reality to today's modern photography which only in very few images still shows this unaltered reality.