The Journey of a Digital Photo
Usability in the Digital Photography Workflow
"Amateur photographers only shoot 'snapshots', they don't care about the quality of their photos": thus goes one common belief. But is it that they don't care about quality, or that they cannot achieve it? Others think that "with digital cameras it costs nothing to take a photograph, so it's easier to learn about photography". But has digital photography actually helped amateur photographers take better photos, or are digital cameras yet another complex gadget?
I set out to explore these questions during a 3-month ethnographic research project in the summer of 2006. I visited amateur photographers and interviewed them about their understanding of digital photography and about their own photographs. This short article summarises my research questions, method and findings, and my proposals for improving the design of digital photography products and services aimed at amateurs. This is accompanied by the full project report, the corpus of interview transcripts used during the study, and an extensive bibliography on digital photography from a usability perspective.
Research Questions
- Are amateur photographers interested in the aesthetic quality of their photographs and, if yes, how do they define this quality?
- Do currently available digital photography products and services help amateur photographers in creating good-quality photographs?
Method
As there was little previous research addressing these questions, this study took an qualitative, exploratory approach aiming to create an initial understanding of the field. Ten amateur photographers were recruited among the general adult population of London, UK, and were interviewed twice over a period of two weeks. In the first interview, they were asked general questions about their use of digital cameras and their understanding of photography. They were also asked to discuss their "best" photographs from their collection. The word "best" was deliberately left undefined, in order to discover what amateurs consider a good photograph. Between the first and the second interview, participants took more photographs during different social and recreational events. These photographs were discussed in the second interview, which focused on the techniques that amateurs use and the problems that they face in their everyday use of digital cameras.Findings
- Amateur photographers practice photography as a secondary activity, in the background of another social or recreational activity. Because of of that, they do not dovote enough time to practicing and learning about photography.
- Amateur photographers are interested in the quality of the photographs as well as in their content, but often do not succeed in pursuing quality and are disappointed when a photograph cannot show what they saw in real life.
- The criteria that amateur photographers use in evaluating the quality of their photographs can be classified in four major themes: colour (accurate reproduction of colours, bright and saturated colours), exposure (good graduation along the image’s tonal range), composition (arrangement of the elements of the image) and sharpness (image in-focus, showing the subject with sufficient detail).
- Although modern digital cameras contain a wide array of features that can improve photo quality, these features remain largely unused. Of about 120 photographs examined in this study, 95% were shot with the camera in automatic mode, without any intervention by the photographer.
- Amateur photographers learn how to use their digital cameras and editing software through trial-and-error. Their understanding of digital photography is incomplete and they often cannot explain why a photograph has failed and understand how to improve it.
Resources
- The full project report (PDF, 8.1MB, 69 pages, incl. abstract)
- A bibliography of HCI research on digital photography
- Interview transcripts (32kb ZIP file with transcripts in plain text format)