I am a landscape photographer whose work concentrates on the water in the landscape near my home. I became interested in using computers in my work when I started work on a website to display my photography on the internet. In order to do this I taught myself to use Photoshop software. It was during the preparation of pictures with Photoshop that I started to use the zoom tool to zoom in on small areas of my scanned photographs. This echoed the way in which I used a 300mm zoom lens to take close-up pictures of water in landscapes.
The computer is allowing me to explore the process of abstraction in a much more immediate way than previous methods. The use of image maps or hot-spots is providing me with a way of visually representing the creative processes involved in making my pictures. I am a beginner in the use of computers in art so my ultimate accomplishment at present is my website.
As a relative newcomer to this area of activity, I have no expectations about the way computer art and graphics is progressing. Because of this I don't believe I have seen enough yet to make any comment on its progress. Like many people I wish that Steve Jobs had licensed the Mac operating system to other computer manufacturers instead of restricting its use to Apple Macs. I would imagine that the future for visual computing in science and art is a bright one as the visual representation of data often makes it easier to interpret than written information/numbers on a page. I think that the use of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to represent data spatially will increase quite strongly in the future.
Ideally my work could be improved with the use of an inexpensive digital camera that had the image resolution of medium format film. A printer, ink and paper that produced prints with the same appearance and archival quality as Ilfachrome photographs would also be useful. I use a Canon 300mm Image Stabilising zoom lens on a Canon EOS camera to take my pictures which are then scanned onto my PC using a Nikon film scanner. The use of Photoshop and Dreamweaver software packages has affected my work the most in the last few years.
I don't have enough knowledge to answer this question properly. The use of art and design software and inexpensive computers has made it easier for us to create computer art and graphics but this can be at the expense of the quality of the resulting images.
I suppose the first important milestone in the development of computer technology to me was the use of the Graphical User Interface and mouse pointer of the Apple Mac and Windows operating systems. After this would be the increased speed of computers and availability of inexpensive printers. The last few years have been characterised by the easy availability of scanners to input images onto a computer and software to manipulate these pictures.
I am unable to answer this as I have very little knowledge at present of people working in computer graphics. I imagine the people who developed the Graphical User Interface and mouse pointer would have had a key role in the development of computer art/graphics