John Bentham has won a zillion awards, including two from the Art Directors Club and a 1991 Nikon Photo Contest International prize, and he's shot portraits of stars from Harrison Ford to The Black Eyed Peas for clients and publications from Arista Records to Vanity Fair.

So when he talks about the challenges facing aspiring professional photographers today, we sit up and listen.

"One of the biggest things to ever happen in photography is digital technology," says the Toronto-born Bentham, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, adding a warning that, "Digital's great, but it's also taken a lot of work away from photographers. I know of a number of cases of corporations that, if they've got somebody on staff who's a photography buff, are happy to buy some equipment and send him or her to a photo course rather than pay $10,000 a year for a photographer to shoot events and pictures for their newsletters and reports."

It's a sad change, he says, and anyone interested in professional photography needs to know the new terrain. "I shoot annual-report portraits for a law firm," Bentham says, "One time they asked me to shoot a corporate softball game. Not my kind of thing, but I was happy to do it. Now they can get Bob Simms in accounting to do it. He can shoot the kind of internal stuff for a newsletter or a handshaking ceremony where ordinarily they'd hire a professional photographer."

And in that respect, Bentham says, digital giveth as much as it doth take away. "It used to be there were a few dozen stock-photo houses like Corbis, but now there are hundreds," he notes. "Everybody's archiving everything, and you can search for photos with keywords. It used to be more difficult for a magazine or client to find some unique-seeming image that didn't look like stock. Now there are a lot more resources, a lot more photographers with stuff online. An amateur who's working a retail job or in an office, if he can take a beautiful picture of the Manhattan skyline, touch it up in Photoshop, and sell it for some ad for $500, he's thinking, 'This is gravy, this is great!'"

It's all a matter of recognizing, accepting, and then riding the changes, says Bentham, who even offers a tip: "In a lot of cases, clients don't particularly want a great photograph but just a basic image – something they can then 'paint' in Photoshop. For example, let's say you might normally take a dramatic photograph where you light one side of a face and silhouette the other half. That other half is all in black – no matter what you do, you can't make that side of the face lighter. But if you light both sides of the face, the client can then make that half black if they want to," using Photoshop or similar software.

Some things, of course, never change. Bentham's portraiture and fine-art photographs hang in such venues as Tibet House in New York City, the Alvarez Bravo Photographic Center in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the homes of such personalities as Jay Leno, Uma Thurman, Philip Glass and Frank McCourt. Not the realm of a high-level hobbyist with a digital camera, and never will be.

"Years ago in a photo competition," he says, "I won a scholarship to a workshop taught by Mary Ellen Mark. The most important thing I learned from Mary Ellen was something she said over and over: 'Don't just record, interpret!'"

Bentham's father was vice president of manufacturing for Kodak Canada until his death in 1978. Mom's a retired kindergarten teacher. Bentham. received his bachelor's degree in photography & printmaking from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada, in 1981, then did photography post-grad work at Canada's York University and Ryerson University through 1986. "My first job out of school was assistant to a fashion photographer," Bentham recalls. "I worked for him for two years. He was a good photographer – but he told me flat out, 'I got into it to meet girls!'"

Well, photography is the rock guitar of non-musical types. Bentham himself is now married and lives in Manhattan's West Village.

He likes the Panasonic Lumix DMC L1 both for its Leica lens and for its aesthetics. "It's a bit of a throwback in that it looks like a 'real camera,' a photojournalist style camera," he says appreciatively. "A lot of things on most digital cameras were different from film cameras in terms of the ergonomics; you had to readjust, and learn how to use them again. This one, the controls are very much like on a traditional film camera. I like the classic look and feel."

And much the same could be said of Bentham and his photographs themselves.

www.johnbentham.com