SOME FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY HISTORY

This is a post for  REMEMBER WHENSDAY  .  Visit it to read other memories -- or post your own!  Thanks to Sally in Washington who gives us this meme.

 When we were first married, one of Bill's jobs (while he was going to college) was working for the local daily newspaper as a professional news photographer.  It was a complicated and technical job.  Even snapshot photography was expensive enough that taking pictures was kind of a special occasion thing -- holidays, vacations and the like. 

We have talked a lot lately about how easy photography is now for amateurs.  Our digital cameras make it easy to take pictures -- a lot of them --  and blogging and digital frames make it fun to enjoy and share the results, without digging out those photo albums.  

In the late 1960s, my dad (who was sort of semi-retired by then) got interested in taking slide photos.  He was proud of  his camera, which he thought was the ultimate in modern technology  -- and it was back then.  He got pretty good at it.  In fact, many of the everyday snapshots we have of our four kids are from slides taken by him.  (Who back then had the time or the money to take a lot of pictures of their own kids?)   I'm forever grateful that he made prints of those pictures for us. 

 

I don't have very many snapshots of Dad, because he would usually have been behind the camera, but I guess once in a while he let somebody else snap the picture. (Here he is at the Spokane World's Fair in 1974.)

 In those years, Mom and Dad were able to do some traveling and from every trip they brought back a slide show of their adventures.*   It was pretty much mandatory for all the kids and grandkids to watch the show the next time we were at their house. 

 

I know my Dad would have loved taking pictures with a digital camera.  But I can't imagine that he would have approved of blogging and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have enjoyed displaying his pictures in a digital frame as much as he did running the slide projector and narrating those trips for us.

 

Well, we are not into mandatory viewings at our house, so the digital frame works great for us.  Visitors can look at the pictures if they are interested, but they don't have to.  For us,  it is really fun have our own album right there on the wall.     

I wish though that my dad were still here so we could share our photography tips!  The picture above is my parents walking on the Snake River Path near our hometown of Clarkston Washington.  It is dated 1977 and Bill snapped it when we were there on a visit -- by that time we had moved to Oregon.)

  

*We still have boxes and boxes of mom and dad's travel slides stored away in our daughter's barn; after all these years, I still can't quite bring myself to dispose of them.

Comments

[Carletta]

Such a delightful post Sallie!
It certainly was a different era but I bet he would have come around and had a terrific photoblog. :)

[donna]

So glad I didn't miss this post. It was such a pleasure to read and seeing pictures of your folks was delightful. It was true in my family that taking pictures usually only happened for special occasions.

I think your father would have been proud of both you and your blog.

donna

[Chatty Crone]

My dad was the camera guy too - wouldn't our dads and grandfathers be shocked about the world today and what all we have?

Sandie

[Bill S.]

Great post. I have over 15 camera bodies and many lenses before I was converted to digital. Oh, how much easier and cheaper it now is.

[Happily Retired Gal]

How fun to see photos of your family and learn a bit more about you and your husband in this post. One of these days I'm hoping to scan my old photos (or pay to have them put on DVDs) though I don't know when I'll find the time. I do love my Nikon D60 and the ease with which I can take photographs ;-)
Hugs and blessings,

[Margot at Joyfully Retired]

Sallie, I thoroughly enjoyed this post as we have such similar backgrounds. My father was the camera nut in our family. He made each of us kids create our own box cameras and develop the film in his homemade dark room. We also had the mandatory slide show visits with my dad and mom, my brother and then my in-laws joined the ranks. We groaned (not out loud) but I'd love to do that again if I could.

My daughter took some of the surviving slides and scanned them into her computer. Most of them were still good, although heavy on the green. You might look into that with all your photos. A digital box is new to me but I like the idea.

Jay and I spent a week in Clarkston when we first started RVing. We took a boot camp course there with Life on Wheels. The campground was right on the Snake. Beautiful little town.i