Om Malik Quotes

Remember when vacation photos meant toting along a bulky camera?

I remember having computers at my parents' house growing up. We had different desktop PCs, but my first laptop was an IBM ThinkPad laptop. It was big, bulky, slow and terrible.

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

There are some elements of digital photography that I don't really like, such as the fact that you see the results immediately.

As a photographer, I'm interested in how dramatically photography has changed. Most images are not real or are composites, and most of us don't even know it anymore.

Well, I think the camera freedom is something that we've resisted for a long time and feels like probably the biggest stretch. But it has some huge benefits.

I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

Did you notice what happened when digital photography arrived? Suddenly there were four times as many people on set for a shoot! It used to be a photographer, a couple of photo assistants, stylist and a fashion assistant, hair and make-up and that was about it.

Digital photography makes you a better photographer.

I am one of the last photographers to convert to digital.

From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don't even think twice about snapping a shot.

We are splintering what was the 'camera' and its functionality - lens, sensors, and processing - into distinct parts, but, instead of lenses and shutters, software and algorithms are becoming the driving force.

The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn't take ordinarily. That's the advantage of digital photography.

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

I have equal parts film and digital cameras in my collection. I think that there are ways to Photoshop photos so that they look like you shot them on film, but is that as rewarding? It just depends on the person.

In 1976, Kodak's first digital camera shot at 0.1 megapixels, weighed 3.75 pounds, and cost over $10,000.

My dad used to work at IBM, so we used to get discounts on computers and stuff, and I did have a ThinkPad.

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

The problem for me is that I've never actually studied photography, so it's quite a steep learning curve. Cameras these days do so much for you automatically but I still think there's a point where you should actually know the technical side.

Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.

I don't really have a favorite camera. I use a Leica and Canon a lot. It depends, especially professionally, on the requirements. But my carry-around camera is a Leica.

We've lost these qualities, these abilities to do something by hand. Some illustrators have it still, but it's just not art. We have photography. We have cameras and computers that do it better and faster.