Focus on Black and White

It's May, so it must be National Photography Month!  And that means another excuse . . . er, reason to show off my father's photographs.

Daddy liked to work in black and white, and while I was growing up he usually had a darkroom in the house somewhere and did his own developing.  What's interesting about these photos is that, even though they are black and white, almost all of them were taken at his home in Mary Esther, Florida, and he didn't have a darkroom there.  I don't know where he found a place to develop them for him, because so few places do it anymore.  Maybe he found a vendor online?  I really don't know.

Daddy would take photos of the same things again and again, sometimes from different angles, sometimes in different light.  I have learned that's what a lot of photographers do.  They look at the world differently than I do.  So most of these are subjects that we have many, many (many!) representations of (especially that lamp).  The majority are in color, probably because he had problems finding someone to develop the black and whites.  But he must have had a roll or two of black and white, because these were sprinkled in with the color photos.

front door of the house in Mary Esther

table lamp that sat in the family room

a small selection of Daddy's camera collection

a tree in the back yard

the base of the same tree

bird bath in the back yard

little pig statue in the back yard

a sad-looking dog in a truck in a parking lot
(he must be patiently waiting for his person to return)

Wordless Wednesday

 

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.