The Evolution of the Camera
In the movie Argo, a group of American embassy staff members try to escape from a foreign country before the enemy finds them. To prevent the enemy from identifying them, they attempt to eliminate all the photographs inside the embassy along with all embassy documents. While they are hiding and waiting for rescue, the enemy reassembles the torn pieces of the photographs to find out what the escapees look like. These staff members must leave the country before their photographs are reconstructed. This story only makes sense because it is set in 1980. If a similar incident happened today, it would be impossible for the embassy employees to destroy their photographs in time. There would be too many pictures floating around on the Internet to find and erase.

This example points out how differently we handle photographs today from how we did in the past. At the center of this change is the ever-evolving technology of the camera.

From the Film Camera to the Digital Camera
Before the digital camera was invented, we had the film camera. It captured an image on a piece of film every time we took a picture. Once used, the film could not be erased or reused. To take pictures, photographers needed not only a camera, but also film, which they had to buy every time they wanted to take another photograph. Furthermore, taking a photograph required knowledge, skill, and practice. A photographer needed to learn how to decide an adequate composition for the picture, to adjust the focal length, and to set the film and the shutter speed before shooting. It was important to prepare carefully if a person was going to take a good photograph, because it was nearly impossible to change anything once the photograph had been taken.

The digital camera has changed all that. Since today's digital cameras store photographs in the form of digital images, no film is needed. In other words, taking pictures with a digital camera is practically free. As a result, most people are taking far more photographs than ever they would have before. In the past, when a family took a trip to the countryside for the weekend, they might have taken 10 to 20 photographs. Today, many families will take 100 to 200 pictures during the same countryside trip. When they return home, they can choose the shots they want to keep and discard the rest.

The discarded pictures cost them nothing, except perhaps a little time. Moreover, the digital camera has made it astonishingly easy to take photographs by making all the shooting processes automatic. People who know next to nothing about photography can still produce high-quality photographs.

The transition from the film camera to the digital camera has changed our idea about what to take pictures of. When photographers used film in the past, each photo cost money. Thus, people took pictures mostly on special occasions, such as weddings, graduations, and trips to exotic places. Now we can take pictures of anything we want, whenever we want. No one thinks that taking a picture of tonight's dinner, a lovely pet, or a book you like, is strange or a waste of money.

The Smartphone and Citizen Journalism
By integrating the mobile phone and the camera, the smartphone has further transformed the way we use and think about photography. Nowadays, whenever we want to take a picture, our camera is already in our hand, in our smartphone. The smartphone has also made it easier to share our photographs with others since smartphones come with a wireless Internet connection and social networking apps.

These features of the smartphone have resulted in new picture-taking habits. Taking a photograph of oneself was difficult and not often done in the past. However, the smartphone made it so convenient and popular that taking a photograph of oneself, or a selfie, is now one of the most common types of photography on the Internet. It can be said that the smartphone lets everyone use photography as a tool for self-expression.

The smartphone also enables ordinary people to gather, report, and spread news without relying on the mainstream media, such as newspapers or television. This practice is called citizen journalism. Thanks to citizen journalists, inappropriate or inconsiderate behaviors such as leaving one's pet's droppings on the street or abusing a bus driver are quickly photographed and reported online. Internationally, citizen journalism has played a crucial role in letting the world know the realities of major
world events, such as the earthquake in Haiti and the Arab Spring.

By any measure, the world today is far different from the world as it was in the film Argo. There are infinitely more photographs and amateur photographers now than there were 40 years ago. Some people worry that these changes have made us preoccupied with taking pictures and flooding the Internet with too many unimportant images. There may be some truth in that, but it cannot be denied that technology today has made photography an essential part of our culture and that it has altered the way people see the world.