Due to the evolving state of digital media and technology in general, the “fluidity of the digital” is the concept where people begin to manipulate media/ photos in order to deceive their audience to make a profit or benefit off of the manipulation. For example, “For a company, photography as an image design is an opportunity to sell more products and services”. 

Ritchin implicitly implies how photography used to be an easy concept, meaning it was  captured a moment in time with no type of manipulation so the meaning was just in black and white.  Compared to now, where there are many depths and meanings to one photo which might be manipulated in some type of way. 

One example that examples the “fluidity of the digital” are photo editing applications. In the reading it states that electronic retouching technology is able to “render the photographer, even the subject, virtually powerless.” This is because photo editing applications allow people to manipulate the image and ultimately alter it to the way they want as well as how they want the audience to view it . 

Photography is a great way to capture a moment of time but compared to video and virtual reality, it can be considered one of the weaker kinds of media that is able to capture reality. Photos are only one frame and capture a moment in time as video and virtual reality are able to capture many frames within a specific amount of time and sometimes with sound included. Photos can also be very deceiving based on who takes the photo and how they want the audience to view/ interpret it since they have to take angle, distance, focus, etc. into consideration. I do believe there are ways to manipulate a video to make it seem deceiving as well, but compared to photos, videos have more of an advantage when it comes to capturing reality.