"It would be interesting to find/search for the first digital combat photographer."
I think it's been posted before, but this article is interesting:
http://blogs.phillynews.com/inquirer/sc ... 0/12-week/
The one from October 13. It starts off talking about how Kodak DCS 100s and NC2000s were used in sports photography in the mid-1990s, and has a shot of a man called John Costello taken in Albania in 1999, where he was covering events with a DCS 620. He is surrounded by chargers and batteries and other parephenalia. The photo of him looks to have been taken with a digital camera as well, so perhaps he had a pair of DCS 620s with him, or there was another digital photojournalist travelling with him. I'm getting a weird feeling of deja vu.
I wonder what happened to the photo he is working on? It's reminiscent of the 1999 World Press Photo winner, also of a man with bandaged head wounds, also taken in Albania:
http://www.archive.worldpressphoto.org/ ... /year/1999
Perhaps, as you say, the photographers were travelling in a pack, and stumbled on some chaps who had been shot in the head, and John Costello's chap was less newsworthy than the chap that the World Press Photo people picked, so he didn't win the award.
I surmise that the DCS 400s were far too fragile for photographers to rely on in a combat zone, and the slightly earlier DCS 520s don't seem to have sold as well as the later Nikon F5-based Kodaks. The impression I get is that the transition from film to digital was very swift and very total, and so there wasn't an early pioneering digital war photographer because they all converted more or less simultaneously.
Regarding Mr Tank, the CNN article says that he was carrying flowers, but it's not obvious - I've always assumed he was on his way home after going to the supermarket with his shopping, but for all I know he had his sleeping bag and whatever he took with him to the square. Balls of steels anyway.
Was Terril Jones deliberately photographing the fleeing citizens, or was he trying to capture the tanks, and he just didn't have a long enough lens to fill the frame with them, and no time to change lenses, and Mr Tank was caught as an incidental detail. Question mark? I should break that sentence up.
I'm also reminded of this article, "Fake Photos can Alter Real Memories", which presents a doctored version of the famous shot:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21978560/ns ... e-science/
"To test what effect doctored photos might have, researchers from the University of California at Irvine and the University of Padua in Italy showed 299 people aged 19 to 84 either an actual photo or an altered photo of two historical events: the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and the 2003 anti-war protest in Rome.
The original Tiananmen Square image was altered to show a crowd watching at the sidelines as a lone man stands in front of a row of tanks. The Rome anti-war protest photograph was altered to show riot police and a menacing, masked protester among the crowd of demonstrators.
When answering questions about the events, the participants had differing recollections of what happened. Those who viewed the altered images of the Rome protest recalled the demonstration as violent and negative and recollected more physical confrontation and property damage than actually occurred."
Doesn't follow up on the Tiananmen Square image though. I have to say that after looking at the doctored version a note of discord went off in my head, but I didn't register the alterations until the article pointed them out.