An epiphany would spur Nick Didlick to enter the world of photography as a career choice, which eventually led him to become a digital photography pioneer. In the 30-some years since his first job at a tiny weekly paper, Didlick has traveled throughout the world shooting pictures for newspapers and wire services. Didlick moved from weekly papers to jobs at the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Courier and the Edmonton Sun before settling into a wire service career, first with United Press Canada and then with the newly formed Reuters News Service, working out of Brussels, Belgium. He became a digital photography pioneer and guru. And was photo manager for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. 

One of his first big assignments for Reuters was at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, where 39 people were killed and hundreds injured in rioting before the start of the 1985 European Cup Final soccer game.

“I was right in the middle of it,” Didlick says. “I shot black and white and color. Reuters was very little known at the time. Their pictures fronted everybody’s newspapers around the world.”

For a while Didlick became Reuters’ “riot photographer,” he says, because he “had done the last one and survived. I traveled to a lot of different places. Any time there was a possibility of a riot, especially around a soccer game, I was there.”

Over the next five years he traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as a sub editor and photographer in Brussels and then as deputy bureau chief in London.

“I was in Lockerbie (Scotland) about five hours after the airplane crashed” in 1988, the result of a terrorist’s bomb, he recalls.

He was in Moscow covering a hockey tournament (in 1986) when the Chernobyl accident occurred. “My boss sent me a telex, asking me to go to a place called Chernobyl as soon as I could. He didn’t have any idea of how things worked in those days. Sixty miles outside the city I would have been stopped. You just weren’t allowed unless you had special travel papers.”

Didlick covered President Ronald Reagan, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and, especially, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“She knew me as Nick, the man from Reuters. She would always look for me in the large press pack when we were outside England because she knew (my pictures) would make it to the British papers.”     

In 1988 Didlick had what he calls his second major epiphany after an assignment in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was traveling with a British military patrol when shots were fired in his direction by members of the warring militias.

It was getting more and more dangerous, and he realized that it was time to return to the outdoors lifestyle he had enjoyed when he was younger.