Sally Mann, the 74-year-old photographer renowned for her large-format, black-and-white images, has made a creative pivot that she describes as her “Wizard of Oz moment”; she’s finally shooting digital, and in color.

In a candid conversation on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Mann revealed she’s currently working on a new body of work in the Mississippi Delta using a digital camera paired with a 1940s lens that “doesn’t handle light very well, so there’s this little glow to everything”.

This marks a dramatic shift for a photographer who’s spent decades hauling an 8x10in Deardorf sheet-film view camera that, in her words, “lives in my car”. Yet this landmark transition wasn’t driven by technological fascination or creative experimentation but by something a little more mundane.

“The film is now so expensive. I hate spending that much money on each shot,” Mann explained. “You’re always second-guessing yourself, saying, ‘Is that good enough? Is that really worth $12?’ But with digital, you just shoot, and if you don’t like it, boom, gone off your computer.”