When you think of it the actual idea of photography, the capturing of an image to enjoy in the future, all is much the same. True it is much easier and the equipment much smaller and easier to use, but the idea behind it is just the same.
Of course you can play all sorts of tricks today, with filters here and computer style cut and paste there, but again this was all done in the past too. It took a lot longer and not everybody could do it, but just taking a look at the old books on developing and printing will show you that “tricks” and special effects have been played with since the very dawn of photography, it’s just a lot easier these days. Even the amateur with a home darkroom could work wonders, highlighting this area and making that area darker. With care, you could even add two pictures together.
When it came to “touching up” photographs, that too was done in the past. In these days of computers it may well amaze you that such methods as actually “painting” onto photographs with air brushes were commonly used by the top photographic houses, great for removing the wrinkles that the unkind camera captured on a movie star or other celebrity. Today it is the power of the mouse that rules, but as you can see things have not altered that much.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I must admit to having taken thousands of photographs (the old fashioned print kind) that have never seen the light of day since that first hurried opening of the packet of prints. Like most photographers, I found that many of the images failed to capture what I saw when I clicked the shutter. The result, an image that is never likely to be shown to anyone. This of course meant that, done that way photography was a bit expensive, but in those days there was not much choice.
Today of course things are different, with digital cameras you can take just as many pictures as the memory in the camera allows, throwing away the ones that do not please with a few button presses. But, and this is where things have not changed as much as you think, the pictures that are kept still often do not see the light of day again, they are just held digitally on a computer rather than in print form in a shoe box. You may remember a rather good HP advert, where the people in the pictures were tapping on the inside of the camera image screen asking to be “let out” and printed. Now, we all know that HP wanted people to print out their shots as it would allow them to sell more printers and all the paper and ink that went with it, but I wonder if they had, would they have just ended up in that shoe box again?
So, it is easier and cheaper to take photographs, but the end result is still much the same I reckon, in that the majority of photos are destined to a life on the shelf. Not that there is anything wrong in that, it is just that in this respect of the output of the camera, and that after all is what photography is all about, things have not really changed that much at all….