This is my darkroom kit, the kit I use to develop films in the early age.
There's a little water base and a little thing I bought in a camping store that I fill with water.
I put a heating coil in there to keep the water on temperature.
There's a chemistry with these bottles.
Keep warm. They have to be exactly 100 degrees Fahrenheit or 38 degrees Celsius.
A homemade device that is a sewage pipe that fits a hairdryer just like this.
And that will fit my reels. So after I develop the film, the reels go inside.
I put the blow dryer on. It will dry my film.
Negative sleeves to put my film in after it's developed.
And a few little tools like a chamois to wipe the film's scissors.
A little darkroom timer kind of put together from bits and pieces and made to fit this one case.
Coming into the United Arab Emirates you had to declare obviously what you are bringing in.
They checked every film spool, every container, the chemicals that you were dragging around and your film loads.
And then you bring it to your hotel room, you set up, you tape the windows.
You were not the most popular person in that hotel room once you left because you left a mess behind.
So the time the bath was just unusable after that and you had to dismantle the whole telephone system
in order to get a line and to keep the line and to make everything work with the different wires and everything.
Remember the printing days or the developing days where you have something, you know you have it.
And now this whole developing process becomes something like, just please, nothing goes wrong.
It was 1996. It was one of the first Canon digital cameras.
It was a huge, huge one, very heavy, very difficult to actually see what you were photographing
because there was a sort of little bore in the viewfinder where you approximately had to gamble that there was going to be your picture.
In the beginning you had the NC2000. It was acceptable for if you needed to get a fast picture out but that was about it.
It was heavy too. There was no viewfinder on the back. You couldn't check anything.
And as I said, the colors were really bad.
It took a whole lot to improve that image to acceptable quality.
It used to take me two or three days to look for the negatives and go to the lab to process
to make prints or to whatever, to scan them or whatever. Nowadays it's in minutes, you know, the client gets the pictures.
So it's a huge change in terms of archive.
I remember kickoff 1998 opening match Paris in Paris, Brazil versus Scotland.
We had quite a lot of photographers in the stadium and within three minutes I saw the first images on the screen
in our editing center and I was like, wow, this is unbelievable.
I mean, it went like crop and size and then we put the caption on, we proofread the caption and we send them off.
And that was, for me, there was absolutely no way that we would go back ever.
I remember vividly running up a hill in Tora Bora with David Guttenfelder and Jim Neckway
who are both considerably fitter than I am and arrived at the top of this hill panting.
And there were a number of dead Taliban fighters up there being moved and hauled away
and I shot some pictures with the film camera and I went to use the D30
because I thought this was a moment that needed to be recorded for Newsweek
and the damn thing just wouldn't work.
I kept pressing the shutter and it wasn't taking any pictures which was awfully frustrating to say the least
but eventually, you know, I got a frame out but, yeah, that camera really was a bit of a pony.
I was waiting for the perfect camera to come.
I think I was very lucky that I can choose because I was shooting for an agency, you know,
I decided the stories that I want to work on and the format that I want to shoot
and I was waiting for this camera to arrive.
I wanted a large file because I shoot, you know, when I'm on assignment for a magazine,
you know, I want to give them the ability to run a double page
you know, having to try to spread it somehow with a small file
and the biggest advantage was having a full frame.
So after the D30, the next digital camera I had was the EOS 1D
which Newsweek sent to me for the invasion of Iraq and it arrived in an envelope in Kuwait
and I was determined at this point not to shoot digital
because my experience in Afghanistan really hadn't been good and I just didn't trust it.
I was familiar with it, I didn't know what to do with it really
and shooting big SLRs again was not something I wanted to do
but it was pretty clear once the war started
in fact that I wasn't going to be moving any pictures for months if I didn't shoot digital.
I'd say about in 2002 there was absolutely no more issue on whether we should send someone with a film camera
or especially not in the news or sports categories.
There was absolutely no question, I think that's where it reached the point
where a general acceptance in the market has been reached.
A digital distribution system for seven was the only rational system that we could employ and afford.
The old agencies distributing slides everywhere, processing film, that model, it didn't really work anyway
but it certainly wasn't something that we could afford to entertain.
I was covering Bollywood Film Awards this weekend, the Oscars for the Indian film industry
and the red carpet was there, my computer was behind me and I was shuttling back and forth.
Why? Because it's possible, there's no developing involved, no printing involved,
just take your car out of your camera, put it in your computer and send it.
I can say that 99% of my work is done with a digital camera, with a Mark II and one DS Mark II.
Digital photography is how old? Six years, seven years really, maybe a little longer.
Where was film? Film photography has been around for 150 years and film developed a lot.
New cameras came about because of new formats in film.
The greatest revolution was probably the design of the 35mm camera just before the Second World War.
So I'm really interested to see where the manufacturers take digital cameras
and I think if they stay firmly planted in the tradition of cameras really that came out of film
that would probably be a mistake. I think a lot can be done and I'm very interested to see where they take it
and I think it's only going to be good news.
