My Favorite Photos – First Frame

Among the thousands of photos, you likely have, do you have some that are your favorites?  I certainly do.  I have no idea how many film camera photographs I have taken over my lifetime, but I do have 24 photo albums filled with photos and four large shoeboxes stuffed with loose photos.  Over the years, I have scanned many of these that are particularly special to create digital versions.  In 2003, I switched to exclusively using digital media (camera or phone), so now it is easy to count—I have over 20,000 digital photos.

While I have read reports that taking photos actually diminishes our mind’s ability to recall an event, I never shy away from capturing some special moment.  I consider my lifetime of photos my greatest physical treasure and although I don’t have a safe place outside our home to store the photos, in the event of an emergency, these albums are what I would grab on my way out the door.  With digital photos, it is much easier, and I take extra steps to keep backups of all those digital files offsite.

This was my dad’s favorite photo of our mom; I don’t know if my mom had a favorite photo of his or not.  But recently, I realized that I had actually shared many of my favorite photos in previous blog posts.  Some of these I took myself, but others were taken by friends or family members.  So rather than having to go through all those old posts, I thought I would create a compendium of some of my favorite photos.

My earliest favorite photos date back over forty years ago to before my wife and I were married.

This photo was taken at my fiancé’s parent’s home, at one of the many parties her parents threw with their close friends, this one possibly celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.  I came into the den and found my future wife sitting in this side chair.  Her smile, her hair, her expression at just that moment, I thought what an absolutely beautiful young woman I was marrying.

At Easter of that same year, we were at my parent’s house having a big Easter lunch.

I always loved that red dress on my future bride whenever she wore it so after lunch, I suggested we get a picture of her sitting on my first sports car, a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am.  While the mechanical woes of that late 1970s car brought me few joys, this photo of my wife sitting on it has always been special and it even made it onto my montage photo of cars I have owned over the years, top and center.

That fall, we both made it into another of my favorites.

Once again this was at a party and the photo obviously was taken by someone else.  The party was given in honor of the two of us by the parents of one my wife’s lifelong friends at their home about a month before our wedding.  Again, my wife-to-be had that beautiful smile, perfectly coifed hair, and though not easily seen in this photo, a rose surrounded by baby’s breath pinned in her hair.  It is easy to see that we were both very happy anticipating our future marriage.

We were married in December of that year and before we celebrated our third wedding anniversary, we had two children aged thirteen months apart.  Here they are dressed up in their wedding finery, our daughter the flower girl and our son the ring bearer.  I think the wedding was for one of my wife’s cousins.

One of the things we did as our kids grew older was once a year (or more often in some cases) we would take them to have their photos professionally taken.  Although this is not the first of just the two of them, it is my favorite of them.

After we moved to our second home, our third child came along.  To give them a nice play area in our backyard, I decided to build them a club house with a tall slide and a sand box beneath it.  At the time, our third child was just old enough to offer his help.  He even made his own ladder out of a pipe play set.

Any father who has just one daughter knows the special relationship that typically develops between the two of them.  While I was never good at playing dolls with her (I found it much easier playing cars or Legos with my two sons), I did take in special events with her.  My daughter was a girl scout and once a year they would have a father-daughter hoe down at the school.  We have several photos from them but this one is special to both of us as my daughter framed it for me as a gift for Father’s Day, signing it that she would always be my little girl (which she still is!).

Another all-time favorite is this one, another from a professional photographer photoshoot.  We actually have several from this photo session in the house but this one is my favorite.  What beautiful smiles and expressions all three kids have.

Over the years of our kids growing up, I continued to take lots of photos of them.  As I mentioned, it wasn’t until 2003 that I got my first digital camera so many of these photos were printed from film.  One year for Christmas, I gave each of our three children a CD of all the photos of them growing up that I had scanned in.  My first chance to see the fruit of my labor was when my daughter got married and at the wedding reception, she had a slide show of some of them.

     To be Continued…