Visit David Mendelsohn’s Website and you’re greeted with a seemingly simple choice. Would you like to see his personal work or the commercial images he’s paid to create? Choose the first and you’re taken into a world of desaturation: black-and-white and sepia tones dominate this collection of mostly human forms. Choose the latter and you’re greeted with the polar opposite: a bold color palette and striking compositions of the unusual and the everyday—all vivid in every sense of the word. Then you ask yourself: Could these two distinct bodies of work possibly come from the same photographer?

Like commercial and fine-art shooters, photojournalists are moving forward with the new digital technology. Today’s most talented photojournalists have embraced digital for its ability to allow them to do more to tell a story through photographs. The limitations of film—its bulk, the need to handle it carefully, being tied to a single film speed while you’re shooting a roll—don’t apply. Digital technology gives a photojournalist the power to shoot much more freely all the time. Using digital gear, photographer and world traveler Jeffrey Aaronson has been able to do some of his finest work.

Roger Goldammer has just driven some 20 straight hours to Boulder, Colo., so Michael Lichter can shoot his award-winning bike, “Lowtek.” “He has a reputation as the best,” says Goldammer, whose sweeping green creation rides super-low to the ground. With the recent renaissance and TV popularity of choppers on shows like Discovery’s American Chopper and The Great Biker Build-Off, such trips to Lichter’s studio have become common.

Robert Beck’s arsenal of gear is as eclectic as the variety of sports he photographs for Sports Illustrated—he has a full collection of equipment, from Holga cameras to the latest digital SLR systems. SI staff shooters receive their assignments on Monday morning and, frequently, Beck is on the road by that afternoon to cover whatever venue or event the editors in New York deem necessary for the magazine. When you have to be that mobile, having gear that you know will get the shot for you is essential.