D-Day photographers * Normandy

[CaptO]

Another one of my older cameras is a Yashica twin lens - the poor man's version of your rollieflex. I couldn't agree more about the differences between cameras and the results you get. I was a film purist for a long time and for the most part I still am. Digital is great for the snapshot market for so many reasons, but it takes a lot of money to equal the quality of film. In 1999 I was working at a professional photo supply store while in Dallas (the year before I went to OCS) and digital was beginning to gain in popularity. The commercial snapshot-type cameras were expensive and in the 2 mega pixel range so they weren’t real good. The digitals that were built on Canon EOS 1-n (the DCS-1)bodies were in the $40K range so they were only in the realm of pro’s (and not many at that.) Almost all commercial photography was shot on medium or large format with the most common being 4x5, 6x7cm (Mamiyas), or 6x6cm (mostly Hasselblad.) Having been out of that industry for I while I can only guess, but I would bet you that as the price of digital comes down, digital will be more and more a part of commercial photography. It has taken hold in the fashion industry for sure. For catalogs and the like, I’m not sure. One of the guys I worked with did the room scenes for JC Penny’s with an 8x10 camera. I doubt that even 2008 digital technology is quite that good without being ridiculously expensive. In the end, however, it ends up digitized anyway for incorporation into the digital layouts for brochures and catalogs.