I moved from Paris to New York in 1971. Right from the beginning I was different—my accent, my name, which no one could pronounce. In France, I had found myself in law school, miserable. I longed for a life in a more artistic, creative field. It’s said that many photographers become photographers because they cannot draw. I had always been an image-oriented person, but my dreams of art school had been tempered by my feelings that I wasn’t good enough at drawing and painting. Out of that frustration, my attraction to the camera was born.

The combination of professional-level digital cameras that can withstand the rigors of hard-core photojournalism along with the ability to transmit large image files has quickly transformed the work of the combat photographer and the assignment editor.

The first time I held a digital camera, it was forced into my hands by Sam Garcia, a Nikon tech rep and a very good friend. “Look,” he said, “I know you love your F5 and would never switch, but just try this.” That was in January of 2001, and I haven’t shot film since then, give or take five or six rolls.

Suggest to Howard Schatz that the computer is shortchanging photography, and he bristles. In his view, the end result, the beautiful image, justifies any means needed to attain it. “Working in the darkroom is a very respected craft—to alter contrast, to crop, to burn, to dodge, to bleach, to diffuse—to do all the things you can do in the darkroom,” says Schatz. “When you hear ‘computer,’ it sounds like you’re cheating a little bit, when in fact it’s the same thing. You just have so much more control, and the range of what you can get from a negative is so much greater. So I use the computer as a digital darkroom.”