In 2005 I started work as a public relations officer in local government in Albany. When my employer learned that I could take usable photos, I was encouraged to acquire a digital SLR for the organisation. I began to use it to photograph people, events and local attractions.
The photos I took for work belong to the organisation, but I began to take some similar photos in my own time, like the one above, using the Olympus digital. I live in an attractive area popular with tourists, and I started to photograph some of the attractions like a tourist.
It was great to use an up-to-date SLR camera at work, but it was frustrating that I could only use it in working hours, not in my own time. All the same, it enabled me to learn about using a digital SLR before I acquired my own.
When I used it to photograph events, I could fire off many shots of a single aspect of the action. I could sift through the photos later to find the one that most accurately reflected the person or activity through body language, expression, eye contact and so on.
This was the early consequence of going digital. Since then, I have photographed many events: from motor sports and ball games to blues musicians and community celebrations. In the film era, I would have approached event photography very differently, due to my frugal use of film. Using a digital camera, I could take a large number of photos and happily accept a low strike rate of usable images.
In the transition period, when I was scanning prints to use in my freelance work, I would end up with one or two jpg files of the photos that I wanted. There was no need to scan and store the rest of the shots on the roll of film, you just put the prints and negatives away in the cupboard. But now, with a digital work camera, I had to handle dozens or even hundreds of digital files. I quickly decided to file the photos in folders within folders on the computer: one folder for each month inside a folder for each year, and sometimes further layers according to need.
Meanwhile, when not at work, I continued to use the Olympus point-and-shoot. I shot photos such as this one, of an event at the Kalgan River Bridge. It was fun to get the photos with the little camera on the weekend, but I knew where I was headed.