Well, it seems like I have made the transition to digital photography without really knowing I did. I still have my Nikon F5 and lots of rolls of Velvia but every picture I have shot over the last year has been digital. I am not going to sell my film gear. There is very little value to it and I still like using it for some subjects such as flowers and macro but lately I haven’t been shooting flowers and macro so I haven’t been shooting film.

My transition to digital was not a matter of economics or ease or professional demands. I can still sell film images just as easily as I sell digital images. My transition was powered by what I was photographing. For the past three years I have been extensively photographing an old, traditional New England dairy farm 4 miles from where I live. Many of the shots I need are either inside a barn, on the back of some farm tractor or happening very quickly. For all of those situations I am shooting handheld; there is no chance of using a tripod. I therefore have to have high ISOs to give me the shutter speeds I need. The fact of the matter is that digital photography allows me to shoot at much higher ISOs and still get great pictures. I shoot at ISO 800 all the time and most of the time I don’t need to scrub the grain out of the pictures with a noise reduction application on my computer. I never could’ve gotten the shots I do now using film.

Nikon’s new cameras, the D3 and D300 are even better with high ISO photography. My great friend John Shaw tells me that he shoots at ISO 1600 or even 3200 and is stunned with the results he gets. It is just a matter of time before I get one of these cameras to shoot in the barn.

The lens I use 75% of the time is the Nikkor 24 – 120 VR. It stays on my camera and allows me to get both the wide shot and the tight shot by just zooming. Again, my compositions come at me unplanned and with no time to change lenses. This lens is perfect for scenes and for people portraits. When I am not using the 24-120 I put on the Nikkor 12-24. I use this when I am in tight, small areas but I want to capture the whole scene. It is a wonderful lens.

The nice part of using just one camera (the D2x) and two lenses is that they are easy to carry with me no matter what I am doing. I use the LowePro Slingshot 200 AW to carry my gear. It slips over my shoulder and rides comfortably and out of the way on my back and yet my gear is easily accessible by just sliding the bag around in from of me. I have used this when catching bales of hay in the back of a hay wagon, riding on the fender of a tractor plowing fields, scraping up cow shit in the barn and riding on the back of a four wheeler. In all these cases it was not possible to stop and put down a camera backpack on the ground and get out my gear. I still have my LowePro trekker photo backpack that I use when I am traveling with all my gear.

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