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Marty Snyder

Artist’s Statement and Biography

The “Art” of Digital Photography

What is a Digital Photograph? You do not need a digital camera to create a digital photograph. A digital photograph, simply put, is a photograph whose visual information has been converted to numbers. This conversion is accomplished using an electro-mechanical or purely electronic device called a digitizer.

The first digitizers were developed by the Scitex Company of Israel and were electro-mechanical, using photomultiplier tubes. Scitex image scanners were very large, taking up as much room as a two-car garage. Scitex was instrumental in the development of all types imaging technology, both input and output, and was eventually purchased by Eastman Kodak.

Waiting Double DutchEnigma

Today, most digitizers use charge-coupled devices (CCD’s) which can be very small.

A digitizer works by reading the value and hue (shade and color) of the visual image, converts it to numbers, and maps those numbers to a grid. The fineness or coarseness of the grid determines the resolution of the image: The finer the grid, the higher the resolution. Resolution is measured as the number of pixels contained in the image or in a given area of the image. PIXEL is an acronym for “picture element.”

A digital camera is simply a regular camera that has a digitizer inside of it, instead of film. Taking a picture with a digital camera is fundamentally the same as taking a picture using a regular camera.

ZebSaxSo Why Digitize?

The “art” in using the digital process has little to do with what kind of camera was used or what kind of digitizer was employed. The real creativity comes into play after the photograph has been digitized—By manipulating the numbers using a computer with image manipulation software. The power that the artist-photographer has using these electronic tools renders the traditional darkroom archaic and feeble.

The earliest consumer image manipulation software was created for the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh computers. Early-on, Letraset brought out “Image Studio,” Fractal Design introduced “Color Studio” and Silicon Graphics followed with “Digital Darkroom.” But the software that really created the digital photography industry as we know it today was developed by two brothers: Thomas and John Knoll. They dubbed it “Photoshop” and licensed it to Adobe Systems (Adobe later purchased the rights to the software outright). Thomas Knoll is still part of the Adobe Photoshop development team.

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Martin Snyder is an alumni of Central High School of Philadelphia (224th class), Philadelphia College of Art (1970), and was an electronic media teacher at the University of the Arts from 1986 to 2006.

His photographic work has been exhibited in one-man shows and group shows at:
Martin’s inspiration is drawn from the work of Thomas Eakins, who embraced technology.