All my life, my dad has been into photography. Cameras were his gateway to the world much like the net is mine. He liked taking snap shots of all sorts of things and made a career of it for much of his professional life. Even after he retired, he set up a dark room in our garage. The smell of chemicals was as much a part of that garage as the car was.
Yet all things change and my Dad who used to sell pictures hadn't. He still had that old 35mm camera. He still shot black and white film. Eventually, I think he realized that he wasnt going to get rich taking black and white wedding photos and the dark room, which was very much a part of him, fell into disarray.
It just wasn't used. It was obsolete, over the hill, old. My Dad lost a part of himself when he tore it down. I decided to do something about it.
Now normally, I had gotten my Dad small gifts for his birthday. The usual fare: ties, shirts, computer games. Nothing too extravagent. Nothing too expensive. But when his birthday came again, I went to best buy and got him a digital camera. I knew I had one shot at it. My dad was as much an artist as he was a photographer. If the camera took cruddy pictures, or was too hard to use, or didnt look like a camera, or was one of those pocket wonders, he would put it away and use it as an expensive paper weight. I spent a fair amount to make sure that didnt happen. I didnt realize how good I did until much later.
You see I got a newspaper clipping in the mail. In the clipping was an article about the first picture my dad ever took with it. It seems he went to a civil war reenactment and took some pictures. One of them he submitted to an online magazine. They liked it so much they put it on the cover of their real magazine. They liked it so much they made it picture of the year.
My Dad thrilled to death took the picture to the local sports store where he sold prints to the locals. The proceeds from those prints went to the wives whose husbands had been called up for the war in Iraq. It was a local relief effort to help them make ends meet.
By helping my Dad, I ended up helping a whole lot more. He liked his camera, and that makes this year's gift all the more challenging.
