Digital photography was quickly embraced in several professional fields of endeavor where the cost of $12,000-$30,000 cameras was easily outweighed by the convenience of having digital images instantly. Here’s a quick summary:

• Photojournalism. Newspapers, news magazines, and news Web sites need visuals quickly, and can’t wait for their photographers to fly images back from Afghanistan. Digital images, which could be transmitted by phone lines in the early 1990s, can be zapped across the Internet today, sent by satellite phones, and be ready for publication immediately. Think like a photojournalist and go digital.
• Portrait photography. Digital technology has been important to professional portrait photographers because it gives them the opportunity to sell prints and enlargements immediately after the sitting, when the customers’ interest is highest. Digital portraits are easier to retouch, too. If you decide to produce portraits of your own family and friends, or need a passport photo quickly, you’ll appreciate digital technology, too.
• Photoillustration. Commercial, corporate, and industrial photographers all have taken to digital photography in a big way. For catalog work, digital photography has become the way to go because repetitive setups can be shot one after another quickly, and the finished images are immediately ready for placement in a catalog layout.
• Everything else. Although the preceding three fields were the first to adopt digital technology, today every other kind of picture taking is rapidly turning digital. Travel and vacation photography benefit from the ability to reshoot immediately if a picture is not to your liking (rather than schedule a repeat trip back to the Taj Mahal). Family and pet photography thrive on the instant feedback digital photography provides. What better way to encourage your kids to cooperate for that shooting session than to show them each group of pictures on your camera’s LCD?