Scene on the Road

As I'm on vacation during this historic week, I can't help but wish I were photographing instead of watching the Phillies on television. Because I'm a photographer, I end up relating everything to photography.

Besides looking in the background for my fellow Inquirer and Daily News photographers, as I'm watching the National League Championship Series, all I can think about is how for the past decade, whenever I give a talk to a camera club or photography students or school newspaper photographers, I am always asked the same questions about digital cameras. "Do you still use film?" and "Does everybody at the Inquirer shoot digital?" So for at least the past eight years, since I was issued my first digital camera by the newspaper (a Nikon D-1 to cover the 2000 presidential campaign) my answer has been a pat, "the Inquirer has been shooting with digital cameras since as way back when the Phillies last appeared in the Playoffs. Anyone know how long that's been?"

It's been good for a least a dozen laughs. The answer, of course is 1993 – the year the photo at the top of this post, by Ron Cortes (shot on film) was turned into an Inquirer souvenir poster. It was exactly fifteen years ago today - on October 13, 1993 - Phillies reliever Mitch Williams jumped up on the mound after pitching a strike out to end the game and win the National League Pennant. They beat the Atlanta Braves 6-3 at Veterans Stadium in game 6 of the NLCS, in one of the team's greatest moments, at right, captured (on film) by Jerry Lodriguss.

So this got me thinking more about digital photography and I sent an email to my fellow Inquirer photographers to verify the story I've been telling all these years.

Jerry could only recall using an early Sony camera, tethered to a recorder that he had to carry around on his shoulder. He said he only used it once as an experiment at a Temple University football practice. The first time he used a digital camera for publication was for the Final Four at the Meadowlands in 1996. He remembers "the paper plunked a Kodak NC2000 in my hands on the opening day of the NCAA Final Four and told me that I was going to use it to shoot with it."

But Eric Mencher emailed me that I was right. He indeed used the "modified Nikon F3 with a huge battery pack and storage unit," during the 1993 playoffs and series, adding, "It was a monster to lug around." He made the front page photo with the camera - of the same Mitch Williams - walking off the field alone after throwing the home run pitch to the Blue Jays’ Joe Carter which won the World Series for Toronto. The very last time the Phillies appeared in the Fall Classic.

The email I sent everyone also got many of my coworkers thinking digital history as well. Photographer Michael Perez, who studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology - right next door to Eastman Kodak’s World Headquarters. But the underclassmen where not allowed to check out cameras because they where expensive. He recalled, “It was a funny time to be studying photography. Even some of my professors where learning photoshop on the fly." Michael is in Los Angeles now covering Games 3,4 & 5 with Daily News photographer Yong Kim. You can see their images on philly.com's new Phillies photos page.

Michael and Mike Levin both sent me links to stories about Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak Co. who built the world’s first digital camera in 1975, in Rochester. On its thirtieth anniversary, he told Associated Press reporter Ben Dobbin his 8-pound “filmless” still camera “was a little bit revolutionary.” It took twenty-three seconds to capture a black and-white image on a digital cassette tape. The resolution? 10,000 pixels. That’s 1/100th of a megapixel.

Sasson was recently honored at Photokina 2008. Click here or on the photo above to see an interview (that’s him there with the actual prototype).

Besides sports, the advantages of shooting digital were also apparent for shooting overseas news stories. Also in the mid-90's John Costello was melting snow and ice over a camp stove for water to mix chemicals to process his color negatives in Bosnia, which he then had to scan to transmit back to the newspaper using his Apple Powerbook G-3 and a satellite phone.
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So when he returned to the region in 1999 to cover the conflict in Kosovo, having a digital camera saved him a couple steps. He recalled having to “to give up my film cameras (forever),” as he was handed a Kodak DCS620. That's him, working on the border in Albania, running everything off a truck battery.

But the Inquirer was relatively slow to totally convert to digital. The newspaper didn’t even get color presses until 1993; photographers then shot color negative film and scanned it. Senior Photographer Clem Murray, who was then head of the department, said “we bought a couple of the old Kodak digital cameras...but they cost an arm-and-a-leg -- $15,000 a pop.” Mike Levin sent me this photo of one of our old DCS 200's sitting on photographer Ed Hille's desk. The strobe was "dried out" a bit too much, in an oven after some water damage - by another staffer. Sarah Glover, who came to the Inquirer’s New Jersey bureau in 1999 remembers still shooting film for least two or more years after that. She has been active in national photojournalism organizations over the years and was surprised that “we were probably one of the last staffs in the country to go completely digital.”

The first large staff to make the switch was the Gannett Rochester Newspapers in New York (the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and the Rochester Times Union). That’s staff photographer Reed Hoffmann, clearing out film gear there in 1996. The photo is from a history of the NC2000 by Eamon Hickey at - robgalbraith.com - Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights. Rob “was dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic age,” when his paper, the Calgary Herald began its conversion to all digital photography in mid-1994. He’s now a freelance editorial photographer, digital photography trainer and workflow consultant, and his website is still the premier online resource for working digital photographers.