2

Digital photography is not that different to start with. Instead of a film emulsion made of randomly scattered light sensitive grains, a digital camera consists of a regular grid of light sensitive sensors:

These too react to and capture light when a picture is taken:

The digital example certainly looks more geometric. But that is not the important difference between the two methods.

Both analogue and digital photography are about capturing and transmitting visual information, but they share two problems:

first - no camera, however much you have paid for it, can ever be perfect. The image is captured via a lens and light sensitive devices and there are all sorts of ways that imperfections enter the chain.
second - unlike "Yellow Splurge..." above, a real life picture will contain a vast amount of information in it, approaching infinity in its complexity. It is unreasonable to expect any device to be able to capture all the information present in the original. So, some information needs to be thrown away.

It is in the way that information is discarded that the real difference between analogue and digital becomes clear.

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