Graham Tidy looks back over 25 years of photography at The Canberra Times

Moving to the nation's capital from Adelaide, I gave myself two years to test the water. Twenty-five years later, I'm still here, and with the same employer, albeit, three owners and 10 editors later.

1989 was the year of the tragic shooting of AFP assistant commissioner, Colin Winchester, the year self-government was formed in the territory and also the year the beloved Canberra Raiders won their first of three premierships.

Having to adjust to the style of the newspaper, the actual gathering and processing of images was very much the same as I had experienced at The Advertiser.

Initially shooting black and white film, hand processing was an option, but generally, for speed, we used a film processing machine to produce the negatives.

In the darkroom, an automated print processor was used, helping to cut the time taken to produce a print, ready for viewing at the editorial conference.

Captions to accompany the prints were attached, after being produced on a typewriter, describing the event, with all the relevant details.

In the event of an assignment taking you to the country or interstate, a laborious and stressful process had to take place.

A portable darkroom had to be packed, consisting of film processing tanks, chemicals, enlarger, printing paper and a picturegram machine that transmitted images down a telephone land line.

Communication with the office was generally by two way radio in the office car, or if that was out of range, a public phone box came in handy.

Pagers were the next piece of technology we embraced, firstly beepers, then text displays, followed closely by the first "brick" mobile phones.

Then, with the introduction of colour pages, we migrated to shooting colour negative film in 1996, purchasing a new processing machine and then scanning those images to the computer.

With the introduction of computers as our new work tools, quite a bit of training was required.

Just as we became familiar with that whole process, the first magical digital cameras were bought by the company, just prior to the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.

At great expense to the management, each photographer was allocated two new camera bodies. It was a real novelty, being able to view the images instantly and not having to spend hours in the darkroom and breathing in chemical fumes.

Now instead of scanning individual negative frames, it was just a matter of uploading the memory card and viewing the digital files on the computer screen.

As the digital cameras evolved over the years, the quality of the images produced improved dramatically and features like wifi transmission and video capture have become the norm.

When I first moved to Canberra The Canberra Times was using Nikon F3 and FM2 camera bodies. The rest of the kit consisted of two speed lights a 17-35 mm zoom and an 80-200 mm zoom. A number of telephoto and wide angle lenses were available from a shared pool.

With every camera upgrade, you wouldn't think it possible for them to improve as much as they did, but that's exactly what happened.

Just when you think you have a great camera the next model arrives, and you think, "how can the manufacturers possibly improve them?".

The F4 was a great camera, probably my favourite and then they released the F5

Same story!

Then, with the introduction of the D1, the way we worked changed dramatically.

I can distinctly remember shooting a press club luncheon and continually looking on the back of the camera to view the images. The television cameramen were equally impressed and used the images appearing on the back of my camera as cut-aways during the event.

Despite the massive advancement in technology, the most fundamental parts of the job are still the same as they were 25 years ago.

Building trust with your subject, being knowledgeable about the events you are assigned to, having a good eye for what makes a good image and being able to anticipate and react quickly to events as they unfold.