My Father the Photographer

While I absolutely adore finding (and identifying!) photos of my ancestors and other relatives, and that's certainly the direction that Elizabeth has suggested to celebrate National Photography Month for the Genealogy Blog Party, I'm not taking that tack.  Instead, I'm focusing on the most important photographer in my life:  my father.

Self Portrait, by Lynn Sellers

Daddy was what he called a semiprofessional.  He was really into it, and we even had a dark room in most of our homes while I was growing up.  He often competed (and won prizes) in contests.

He primarily worked in black and white, and that's the only type of photographs he developed at home.  He said that working with color was a lot more difficult.

I still don't have access to the vast trove of the photos my father took.  They were moved from Florida to Texas after he died last year.  Currently they're at my sister's house in San Antonio.  Her niece might be working on digitizing some, or at least that was the plan.  Being the family genealogist, I hope that at some point they will make their way out here to Oregon.  I want to (with any luck) make sure they're all identified and then store them archivally.

Before taking the containers of photos to my sister, my stepbrother found one photograph I was happy to see.

My father had stored the framed photo in a box.

That's me, sometime in the 1970's.  My father took the photograph.  I don't know if the photo or framing has any indication of the exact date.  The sepia tone might have come via my stepbrother's phone, with which he took a photo of the photo, or the original may have taken on some tint over time.

While going through one of my old photo albums — the kind that had sticky backing paper and plastic overlays, which we now know are so bad for photos, so I was carefully peeling off the photos and removing them all from the album — I found this photo, which I know my father took.

One of the many Sellers family Siamese cats.

Unfortunately, by the time I found this photo and asked my father about it, his health was very poor and he was forgetting things.  So he didn't remember which of our many Siameses this one was.  In fact, he wasn't even sure he had taken the photograph, although I am.