Like many photographers who learned their craft shooting film, I will never forget the moment in a high school darkroom when I made my first black and white print. It was like magic watching as the image emerged on the prints in the developer tray, and it was the beginning of my love affair with the medium.

On a recent National Geographic magazine assignment to photograph the effects of the drought in the American West this past spring, I had some similar moments of discovery. This time I wasn’t standing in a darkened room full of smelly chemicals lit by a red safelight, I was sitting in a hotel room with my laptop, digitally stitching together vertical aerial images to make