I started taking pictures around 1979 and learned using a 35mm manual and hand loaded Tri-X film. I developed the film and printed it. Later I shot slides but never printed color. Slides imposed new discipline -- since I wasn't printing it, the image on the slide determined what I was going to get in the print.

When digital cameras first came out, I got one. It was terrible; slow, low resolution, bad color, hard to use, ate batteries ... A couple of years later I tried again with a Nikon 990. A funny looking camera and it still ate batteries but the quality of the pictures was pretty damn good. By this time computers were also faster and I learned quickly how to manipulate and improve the images in the computer. Getting prints was still expensive and a bit aggravating.

However it was a pain to use. It didn't use the excellent lenses I had accumulated over the years, it didn't talk nice to flashes and other equipment.

By 2002 things had really changed. Nikon came out with their second generation professional digital camera, the D1X. The D1 was really the first professional camera designed from the ground up -- it worked well but still had a lot of annoying flaws and was pretty expensive.

The D1X changed everything and the modeling and fashion business will soon be dragged kicking and screaming (at least some people) into the digital age...