How sweet digital photography is: Tampa Tribune Staff Photographer David Kadlubowski has a 300mm f2.8 lens on his Nikon 620 digital camera, Jan. 4, at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Photo by Cliff McBride, courtesy Tampa Tribune.

Darkrooms begin to collect dust as digital cameras sweep in

David Handschuh remembers one of his early brushes with digital photography with mixed emotions. It was the birth of his daughter, and he was determined to shoot the happy occasion digitally.

"I took the pictures with a Kodak digital camera," said Handschuh, vice president of the National Press Photographers Association and a photographer for the 1 million-circulation New York Daily News. "It had a 25-pound external hard drive, a real monster ... like carrying a small color television on your shoulder."

That was six years ago. As time has passed, digital photography has grown, and like anything else involving computer chips, the changes have been enormous.

The first useful digital cameras were pushed into the newspaper market by the New York-based Associated Press, which worked with Kodak and Nikon to develop and market a camera just for journalists. AP managers thought digital cameras could give them an edge when covering some events. If successful, AP could recoup its investment by selling the cameras to other news organizations.

"We developed the AP NC-2000," said David Rocha, senior phototechnology product specialist for the AP. "That's the one that drove the market into digital photography. It was the first digital camera designed for the photojournalist."

The NC-2000 was a hit with photographers. It also was good for the AP.

"We introduced it in February 1994, and had a good three-year run with it," Rocha recalled. "We sold several thousand of them."

The NC-2000 sold for around $15,000, considerably more than comparable film-based cameras. But the newspapers that bought them gained several key advantages over their competitors.

"The first, most important advantage, is our ability to get late-breaking news or sports pictures in the newspaper which, because of deadlines in the past, was an impossibility," said Roman Lyskowski, deputy director of photography at the 428,000-circulation Miami Herald. "That advantage is compounded when you are traveling. When you don't have immediate access to a wet lab to process film, going digital allows you to transmit from almost anywhere."

Newspapers initially purchased a few to experiment with, using them as pool equipment to be checked out for specific purposes. At $15,000 a pop, they were a little too valuable to get thrown in a camera bag. Since they were not a part of the standard newsroom workflow, and few papers had a digital archiving system in place, they remained a niche product, albeit a profitable one for AP.

Kodak built the NC-2000 on the frame of a standard Nikon S-90. A second-generation digital camera, the Kodak Eos 3C, was basically the same unit on a Canon frame and included a slightly improved chip. That chip later went into the NC-2000e (for enhanced), which became the standard for several years. Later versions were built on high-end frames from Canon and Nikon, modernizing the electronic components and bringing prices down to about $8000.

Then, in the middle of last year, the world of digital photography took a radical turn. Nikon came out with the D-1, a truly professional digital camera, and priced it under $4500, making photo editors across the country sit up and take notice.

"Where you anticipated equipping half the staff, you can now do the whole staff for the same price," said Dave Frank, a photo editor at the 1-million-circulation New York Times. "We now have 12 fully digital photographers and we expect that number to grow rapidly over the next year, based on these prices."

No muss, no fuss
Although digital cameras still cost more than film-based units, later deadlines and a host of other pluses are fueling the push to digital photography.

"Clearly the advantage of digital is no film, and none of the things that come along with film," Rocha pointed out. "You can stay right up to deadline -- shooting -- walk two feet, open your camera, hook to your cell phone and there are your photos, all done."

Saving time is the first thing mentioned when editors are asked about the reasons for shifting to digital. A dozen different ways on a dozen different days, it's time that is on everybody's mind.

"Going digital, you can cut out the whole middle scanning part, the part that takes the time," said Karl Kuntz, managing editor of graphics at Ohio's Columbus Dispatch, a 250,000-circulation paper. "The biggest thing we used to do was make prints in the darkroom. Then we switched to negatives and scanning. This moves it all out to the photographer and the camera."

Down in Florida, time again comes up as the top priority.

"We're able to provide our readers fourth-quarter Buccaneer's pictures on late-night games," said Allyn DiVito, senior editor for photography at the 289,000-circulation Tampa Tribune, of the National Football League team. "That would not have been possible with traditional photography. Election results, late-night council meetings that go into the wee hours, we can cover it all," he said.

Chief among digital's other selling points are major savings on film and chemicals, as well as unintended benefits in switching from the silver, dyes and chemicals of film to the ones and zeros of digital.

"This stuff is expensive," admitted Bill Phillips, photo editor of the 279,000-circulation Orlando Sentinel, "but we're going to save $60,000 to $80,000 a year in film and processing and supplies."

Getting rid of film also allows newsrooms to recover space formerly devoted to darkrooms, light tables and the other geegaws required to process and edit film, and frees newspapers from one slice of regulatory hell.

"There is no Osha [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulation of chemical disposal because there are no chemicals, no plumbing and none of those related hassles," AP's Rocha explained.

The Orlando Sentinel processes film at the main office in downtown Orlando and at its Lake County bureau. "That will change this year, when the paper opens a new bureau in Lake," said Phillips. "We won't be doing film out there. I've bought my last processor."

But papers that use more freelance photographers than the Sentinel may find the cost savings a little harder to come by. The expense of digital equipment means freelancers will likely be shooting film for some time to come, and if assignments come on deadline their papers will need to keep a film processor up and running.

Tampa's DiVito said publishers can't count on immediate cost benefits elsewhere, either. "Newspapers should not delve into digital photography solely to save money," DiVito cautioned. "We've all found out that maintaining technology is expensive."

Nevertheless, the advantages of being digital are prying open pocketbooks across the landscape.

"We think it makes sense environmentally and technologically," said Mel Caswell, director of publishing systems for Knight Ridder, the San Jose-based newspaper and new media company. "We haven't issued an edict yet, but are trying to coordinate with some of our papers to see if the cost justification is there."

Caswell said Knight Ridder has targeted three papers for going digital: the Miami Herald, the 287,000-circulation Kansas City Star and the suburban San Francisco Contra Costa Times, a 105,000-circulation paper, with the California paper first out of the gate. "Contra Costa showed a very nice return going totally digital," he said.

The Kansas City Star will be moving aggressively into digital photography, according to Rob Perschau, systems editor. "We're going to buy 24 cameras in the next day or two," Perschau said in mid-December, "then, right after the first of the year, buy 14 more." The Herald has plans to buy ten camera bodies and related accessories.

Developing debates
Converting to digital is not without its drawbacks, however, and some of them are significant.

For starters, it's going to change the way newspapers purchase photo equipment. In the 1970s, many newspapers had a small pool of specialized equipment that all staff photographers could use. For the most part, though, photographers bought their own gear based on their perceived needs, and newspapers provided the film and chemicals.

Although that policy has been changing in recent years, digital photography will most certainly finish it off.

"I was driving back from an assignment the other day," Handschuh said, "and I realized I was in a $12,000 car with $65,000 worth of camera equipment."

With expenses like that, most photojournalists won't be able to afford their own stuff and will need to rely on newspapers to either heavily subsidize the cost or provide the equipment outright.

"I just added a new staff position," said Orlando's Phillips, "and it cost me $30,000 to outfit the photographer. We shoot video, too, and I've got half that money tied up in digital [camera] bodies and a digital video camera."

Such monetary considerations have added a new wrinkle in the fabric tying a photographer and a newspaper together. For years, staff photographers have supplemented their income by freelancing. People in a community needing a photographer for any number of reasons would often call their local newspaper to see if a photographer wanted to pick up a little cash for a quick job or two. Newspapers either condoned it or, keeping their own pay scales in mind, turned a blind eye to it.

"As long as we know about it, have the first rights of refusal, and it does not compete with the Sentinel, they can do anything they want," Phillips said. Those days may be coming to an end.

"The Dallas Morning News is now providing all the equipment," said Ken Geiger, director of photography of the 385,000-circulation paper. "If I'm handing somebody upwards of $20,000 in my equipment, they can't go out and freelance with it." Geiger said that he was not trying to stop anybody from picking up extra money, he just did not want them to use his cameras to do it. "They're just too expensive to repair," he said.

Other personnel problems crop up when photo editors have to selectively issue the latest technological marvels.

"We have become a department of haves and have nots," Miami's Lyskowski said. "When we hand out digital equipment, we try to get the most bang for the buck. That has been with sports and travel. The people who don't shoot sports or don't want to travel will get them last. These folks are equally valuable, and it's unfair to penalize them, but they're last."

Newspapers that have started dealing with the digital divide in the staff have also entered into the debate on how -- or even if -- digital images are archived.

In the pre-digital era, photographers would cut a roll of film into strips of six negatives each, then carefully slide the strips into glassine envelopes to preserve every image. The envelopes would be notated and filed so that they could be retrieved at a moment's notice, to provide file shots or illustrations as future stories demanded, but often they were never seen again.

Going digital has changed all that. There are no rolls of film to be cut up and filed. Every photo exists only as a series of ones and zeros in a camera or on a disk, ones and zeros that can be obliterated with the press of a button. Hence, another division has opened up between those who want to continue the film tradition of saving every image and those who want to keep only the items published and a selection of outtakes from any particular assignment.

The New York Times' Frank thinks it's important to save everything, and has tried to make it easy for Times photographers to do so. Since digital photographers need laptops to save, edit, make backups and transmit photos, Frank has them set up to burn CD-ROM disks.

"All of our people have [Apple] PowerBooks," Frank said, "which have a partition that is about the size of a CD [compact disk]. They also have CD burners. When they pull things into the disk, it goes on the partition. When the partition is full, they can burn a CD."

Orlando's Phillips said he may be bordering on imprecation, but he doesn't believe saving all is necessary or cost effective.

"You get the most interest in a photo shoot right after it's shot," Phillips said, "and then it wanes. It's proportional to the amount of time since the assignment."

Phillips has his staff save everything that is shot on film, but not all digital photos.

That strategy is common in the industry, according to AP's Rocha. "When we shot film, everything was archived, but it was easier to do it than not do it," Rocha said. "It didn't cost anything to keep them all. In a digital archive, every image you keep costs money. We have found that virtually nobody keeps everything."

"If you burn CDs," Phillips asks, "who will maintain the archive, who is going to index it, will it be available 23-by-7 or just 9-to-5, who is going to have access? I say save a few more than you otherwise would and toss the rest. Unfortunately, that gets howls because of the 'Monica' factor."

The "Monica" factor refers to the ability of photographers to mine nuggets of gold in the dross of unused photos, such as the image of Monica Lewinsky embracing President Clinton captured by Dirck Halstead for Time magazine.

"He kind of remembered he had it," Handschuh said. "Can you imagine what would have happened if he had pressed delete?"

-- Steven E. Brier

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.