Blue safari

Exactly 20 years ago I hesitated to make the switch from film to digital. As a diehard Nikon user from the early1980s I was reluctant to change brands. When Nikon launched the D1 I was tempted but pulled back. It is hard to fathom now but I was one of those that thought digital would never catch on, or if it did would take a decade or two! My mind was changed on a trip with a friend to India. Every evening on returning to our base I would sling my exposed films into a bag and head to the bar for a beer; Jari however was a digital convert and sat religiously editing his pictures, occasionally showing me a picture on a screen.

The penny dropped, this was the future, so on returning home in the summer of 2003 I bought my first digital camera – a Kodak DCS-14n. When I look back I realise I should have embraced this new technology at the earliest opportunity as I had given some of my direct competitors a distinct advantage.

I vowed after switching that I would not be so slow the next time an opportunity presented itself. Fast forward to mid 2017 and I was on a trip to Spain to photograph eagles with a friend who had just switched from a Canon full-frame camera to the Olympus Micro Four Thirds (MFT) system. My 400mm f/2.8 Nikkor dwarfed his gear, yet when we compared our pictures on our laptops I was impressed by both the quality of the