I have had a digital camera for just over a year now. We bought it primarily so that we could take pictures of wee Oliver and we have done that in spades.

When you don’t have to think about film and processing costs, it’s amazing how different photography becomes. I was inspired to “go digital” by my friend Steve, a professional photographer turned web designer. Steve had all but stopped taking photographs until he got a digital camera, and when he did, he started taking photos again, and he hasn’t stopped. You can see the results on his Outtakes and New England Seen websites.

Since my own conversion to digital, I’d been happy to view my photos on the computer, and to print out the occassional one on our colour printer. By chance last week I installed an application on our server called Gallery to let me share photos with my family on the web. One of the nice little features of Gallery is that it makes it easy to order prints of your digital photos from a company called Shutterfly.

So I did.

My first batch of prints arrived today, and I am amazed: the quality is fantastic. I had no idea that my little camera was capable of producing such photographs. And so digital photography has, for me, entered another realm. Or rather re-entered the realm of print.

I gather that Prism Digital Imaging here in Charlottetown offers much the same service. My next step will be to give them a try. And if that works out, I’ll have to get the silverorange wizards who built their website to construct a Gallery plug-in for it.