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To see what all these trends augur for photographers, we turned to nature photographer Kerrick James, who's sponsored by Pentax, to reshoot a tricky scene he'd shot on transparency film a decade ago, this time using his latest gear.

On assignment for Arizona Highways magazine back in 1997, James had photographed a silhouetted kayaker surrounded by the spookily glowing waters of Emerald Cave, a hidden cavern he'd discovered in the Colorado River canyon. He used a medium-format Pentax 6x7, 35mm full-frame fisheye lens, and Fujichrome Provia 400 film, pushed 2 stops to an effective ISO 1600. Although pushing slide film generally increases grain and reduces color accuracy, this time, he recalls, "the results were surprisingly good."

So we asked James to shoot the same scene over again, this time with his Pentax K20D. He even got his friend to kayak in with him again. Perched on a tiny ledge at the back of the cave, he shot the new image with a 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 Pentax DA fisheye zoom, handheld at ISO 800, 1/180 sec at f/6.7, with exposure compensation of -1 EV and image stabilization (Pentax calls it "anti-shake") engaged. The new photo, on page 70, reveals intricate detail in the rock walls and ceiling of the cave, and even detail in the canyon beyond.

"It was nice to have a higher shutter speed to work with," James says. "The silhouette is much crisper, despite the motion of the kayak. I could stop down enough to get good depth of field. And the noise, even in the shadows, was not a problem."

Still better, he adds, is the wider tonal range compared with transparency film, including his beloved Velvia. "In the old days you lost a lot of color in the shadows."

What's next? Not surprisingly, given the competition, camera makers are keeping mum about their plans. But many anticipate that similar strides in low-light capability will eventually appear in less-expensive DSLRs.

Ultimately, the point is to help photographers get the pictures they want, regardless of the circumstances. "The tools we have today let us push our ideas that much farther to tell the story we want to tell," says Jay Kinghorn. "They're removing the technical limitations we've always had with photography."

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