9/11 was my end in print photojournalism.

The digital photography genie was out of the bottle. My digital photograph, now known as Satan in the Smoke, went viral over email, our social media platform in 2001.

The overriding question was “is it real?”

Suddenly, I was an outsider in the profession. I had no national media firm behind me. I was one person with an assistant, and several photo agencies that marketed my work.

It happened so quickly. Kenny Irby of The Poynter Institute wrote an article that led with the sentence “Seeing may not be believing anymore” and continued even further stating “In this age of digital manipulation, we may not know if an image is real or created.”

This was 2001 and digital photography had not reached that point of no return where everyone was using it. Negatives or original slides were incontrovertible evidence of a real image. My “negative” was code on a Compact Flash card created by a sensor in an Olympus e10 DSLR, circa 2000. As the number of doubters increased, I knew I had to prove that the photograph was real. There was no physical film, but there was a card with the original file, untouched by a photo editing program. It was raw data. And what is that raw data?

A digital image is captured first in black and white, and then magically through mathematical algorithms, the colors are added. The algorithms are credited to one man, who developed all of our digital color to his perception of reality.

And that leads into a whole discussion about the sensors we use in our digital cameras. Do most photographers know that their image starts as black and white on a photo field? Then the filters kick in and extrapolate the colors based on the initial scan.

The “Bayer Array” was designed by Eastman Kodak research scientist Bryce Bayer in 1975, when I was still the Yearbook photographer at Freedom High School in Morganton, North Carolina, learning black & white film and dabbling in color.

Bayer’s layout consists of alternating rows of red-green and green-blue filters, with green dominating due to the fact that the human eye is more sensitive to green light in daytime vision. A process called demosaicing is then performed within the camera firmware and software that approximates the colors. So is the end result the perception of the software engineers?

Bayer was already developing the seed in 1975 that would culminate with capturing “Satan in the Smoke” on an Olympus E-10 digital SLR with a 4.0-megapixel CCD image sensor that was introduced in 2000, a quarter century later. The photograph was saved in jpg format, so quality is already lost. The original file was 2.40MB, when you open it in photoshop, it is a measly 1680 pixels by 2240 pixels, or a 12” x 16” print at 140 pixels per inch. The image is predominantly blue, grey, and black with very few other colors. It was a 1/400 @ f5.6 at ISO 80 on a glorious day.

Photographs are all perception. The fact that my image has elicited such a response is what every photojournalist hopes for. Digital allowed my photograph to be one of the first transmitted across the world of the Twin Towers with smoke spewing like chimneys into an azure sky. On its own, it is a horrific photograph but it was the face of the devil – unmistakable in the smoke – that caused it to become a viral image. Over 25,000 emails flooded my inbox, with messages of support, religion, and fear, while my peers questioned my ethics all because of what was perceived in a photograph.