My Dad's Photographs, 1946-49

My Dad was not a photographer, or at least throughout my life I never saw him with a camera. All of the family photos were taken by Mom with a point and shoot camera for her scrapebook and for cards to family. Even she rarely took photos outside of those of friends and family for events. In addition, my older brother never picked up a camera and my sister followed in Mom's footsteps taking only family photos with a simple camera.

With all that and no other family member being a photographer, it's a wonder I found photography fascinating and have been involved in personal landscape and nature photography on and off since my first camera in 1969. I consider myself a part-time photographer, taking hiatuses for work and life, and am learning to be a serious photographer in my retirement from the USGS in 2005, and following an realization ten years earlier while hiking Mt. Rainier National Park.

Dad passed away in November 1994 and Mom basically sorted out his belongings, giving most of it away and saving only some boxes of personal stuff. She passed away in March 2006 and all her belongings were transferred to my sister, who did the same thing. In the boxes of stuff, however, she found three envelopes of color slides taken between 1946-49. This is a big, "Huh?" to all of us in the family, no one knew about these photographs.

The reason we don't know is that they were taken while Dad was in the Air Force transferring between stations using an Air Force 6x9 camera. From the research I've done, this was a common camera format using 120 roll film producing a 2 1/4 by 3 1/4 image, and it was a standard issue camera in the military. As near as I can tell after three rolls Dad gave up or had to turn the camera in for some reason as there weren't any more photographs.

When my sister found them, she sent them to me. And recently I bought an Epson V750 scanner for my 4x5 images. After sorting throught the three rolls, I found some of them to be interesting, nothing terrifically photographic, just merely interesting as old photographs. And I had to guess at some of the color adjustments, so I apologize if they're a shade or so off.

And who are those people? In the image of the two kids, one is my older brother about age 5 and my cousin about age 3. The people in the "first photo" are friends of Mom and Dad, and Mom is the woman in the middle of the group about 36. We often forget our parents where young, beautiful and full of life.

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