Question

What distinguishes digital photography from traditional photography?

Answer 1

Traditional photography (analog) use films made with light sensitive material, which the photographer expose, then develope in either a darkroom or a machine, using a mix of chemicals, then the film image must be transfered onto light sensitive paper in order to make sense to most poeple.

Edits are typically made in the darkroom with requires a lot of skill to get right. Darkrooms also require chemicals harmful to people and nature. And analog films contains silver which is expensive to produce.

Digital photography use a sensor with a huge number of light sensitive pixels. This sensor and the cameras processor (brain) transforms the data into a file, which is then saved onto a memorycard of some sort (SD or other type).

When the photographer wants to edit the pichure he removes the memorycard from the camera or transfers the image in some way to a computer (laptop/desktop/tablet) for editing.

Some digital cameras come with wi-fi and can transfer pictures to other medias including cloud drives, websites and more.