Wander project through my father's eyes

I have been publishing the Wander project for about four years now. It started when I realized I was doing the same thing my children had done in 5th grade. The wander Indiana project was a requirement for all 5th graders in Indiana. I am adding to that with a through my father’s eyes pictures. My dad loved taking pictures; he took a lot of them. 40,000 + pictures taken throughout the 60 years he took pictures. I am starting in around 1958 with stills and slides and moving to Digital pictures starting around 2005. Dad took around two pictures a day for that period. Every day, nearly two pictures. If digital cameras had been invented back in the 1960s when dad was at his most prolific I suspect there would have been ten times as many pictures overall.

There are several pictures in this collection that dad labeled “family” that I love. One is of me outside of Hoosier Courts Nursery School in Bloomington IN. My sister and I both went to Hoosier Country. There is another picture of my Uncle Fred Grilling that I love. My Uncle Fred and my Uncle Keith are the two Uncles I have the most memories of. My Uncle Jim was someone I saw a few times, but my only memories of him are faded. There is also a great picture of my sister and me, doing something I am sure we shouldn’t have been doing. The angle of the picture and the looks on our faces suggest that we were up to something and got caught by either my mother or father via the camera!

Through my father’s eyes, sadly I don’t always have the thoughts that went into the picture. That is the one thing that is now lost forever. In fairness though, looking over the pictures I take, the moments I capture, I see the influence of my father’s pictures. I see why I take the pictures I take. It is the gentle guiding hand of demonstration. The positive reinforcement of realizing I did pay attention. I did see, all those years of slides and taking something away from that experience. It changed how I take pictures. Like my father, I take more pictures of the scenes around me, than the people. I suspect the rationale is that as my father before me; I knew the people near me, I didn’t know the scene so to remember the people we captured the scenes.

Through my father’s eyes, today mostly people!

My Uncle Fred grilling.