Just this month we moved our office from one Portland, Oregon neighborhood to another. Just a seven-minute trip by car, but about four weeks in the doing. I never realized I had so much stuff I didn't need. Thirty-five millimeter slides, for example. What with the magazine and sundry book projects, there were cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling with images I hadn't referenced in years. Actually, what with the vast improvements in digital photography, shooting slides to maximize image quality is no longer necessary. But storage wasn't the only problem.

A few years ago, a friend of mine, a fashion photographer, got a phone call from a big ad agency. The photographer they had booked for a major bathing suit shoot in Brazil had broken his collar bone and couldn't make it, so they contacted my friend at the last minute. It was a great opportunity and great money. A dream assignment that would ensure lots of work in the future and a foot in the door at top fashion rags like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Well, he went to Brazil, photographed beautiful girls in string bikinis for three days and headed home with a hundred or more rolls of freshly exposed Kodachrome in his suitcase. When he got the transparencies back from the processor, his hands were shaking with excitement. He popped opened the first box and held the first slide up to the light. Nothing. Just a gray wash.

That must be the leader, he thought, the blank inch or two at the start of each roll before it gets wound into the camera. He took out the next one. Same thing. And again and again and again.

Panic time. And each box that he opened told the same sorry tale. All the images had been erased by the X-ray machine at the Rio De Janeiro airport. Long story short, he was sued by the ad agency, had to sell his house to pay the lawyers and ended up shoveling coal into a blast furnace in a steel mill. Well not exactly, but he may as well have. A great talent down the tubes because of imperfect technology.

I've never really lost a roll to the X-ray machines of the world, yet I know lots of others who have. But no more. In the last few years the images that often used to look fluorescent—the reds and yellows would actually shimmer—look pretty much the same as film does, when printed on the page of a magazine. And photo budgets are a fraction of what they used to be, because there is no expensive film to buy or processing to pay for.

This is ideal, of course, for convention photographers. Not only can they edit in the camera, but now they're able to monitor their lighting as they shoot. Too many shadows on the model's arm? Simply move the light stand. Before digital, we'd have to shoot and pray. We never really knew if the lighting worked until we got the slides back. And then it was too late.

The guys that really benefit from digital are bush photographers like Lars Krutak and Travelin' Mick. What with stomping around in nameless jungles on remote islands in uncharted oceans, the last thing they want to lug around is a lot of perishable film stock. Now it's just aim and click.

And you thought nothing in the tattoo world ever changes.

Bob Baxter
Editor in Chief

baxter@skin&ink.com
www.skinandink.com