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I remember several years back I got livid when I overheard someone at a conference say that the arrival of affordable digital cameras (this was 1997 or so) would make us all better photographers. "Hogwash," I thought. "How can technology itself improve someone's art?"

My first exposure to digital photography was acutally in the summer of 1992 during my teaching stint at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. Kodak had just released the DCS100 series of digital camera systems. Those beasts (pictured to the left) were gigantic: a Nikon F3 body with a chunky digital back and, best of all, a huge shoulder-slung hard drive case with an LCD display and an umbilical cord to the digital back. The first model took 640x480 shots; baby, that was the bomb. Not so much revolutionary as backbreaking, slow, quality much lower than film, and expensive. I think it cost five figures, US dollars.

A staggering 12 years later, I finally got myself a decent digital camera. Going digital has freed me from over a decade of careful, uninspired, and boring photography. A failed picture wastes no money, material, or even much time. I don't waste hours scanning negatives and retouching all the dust spots from the scanner bed. I experiment more, I learn from my mistakes, and I grow my techniques. My photography has improved more in the past year than in the last 8 years of film photography, primarily because I am doing so much more of it.

The real benefit from digital technology in the arts is the freedom to experiment. Of course, musicians, whose industry went digital sooner than most, have known this for years, and the cost of a close-to-pro system in the home is now amazingly low. I am also firmly convinced that it is affordable digital technology that is powering the current renaissance in documentary filmmaking; the technology is not making better stories, it's letting us hear the otherwise untold ones.

Not all bad artists become any better through technology. A talentless bedroom musician is not going to become Mozart once he gets a laptop and some software. But a motivated artist can improve themselves through the added practice and risk taking that digital technology enables.

All these years later, I think that guy from 1997 might have been right...at least partially.