After being a photographer for The Post-Standard and syracuse.com (and before that the Syracuse Herald-Journal) for 42 years, I am retiring at the end of the year.
During that time, I have covered breaking news events, high school and college sports, weather and the lives of people throughout the Central New York area.
When I first started, we used film cameras and processed the film in a darkroom and made black and white prints with an enlarger. If we needed to send a photograph to somewhere else or back to Syracuse from another location, we used an Associated Press machine that looked like an old Edison phonograph cylinder and attached the photo print to it. We had a portable darkroom that we carried in a large rolling case that we would set up in the bathrooms of where we stayed on location.
Many changes have happened over the last 40 years. In the early 1990s Canon and Nikon came out with auto focus cameras that were a tremendous help in photographing sports and just about everything else.
Later that decade digital cameras started appearing. We had two Canon/Kodak digital cameras that cost around $15,000 and had a 2 megapixel CCD. With digital cameras and a laptop computer now, we can send photos from almost anywhere in the world.
If you look at the photographs in the gallery, you will see a governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, speaking at the Hotel Syracuse, trying to get the 1992 Democratic nomination for president. You will see a young Jim Boeheim coaching at Manley Field House at Syracuse University. But you also see photographs of people going about their everyday lives in Central New York.
Whether it is the joy of a child opening a Christmas present, a winning shot at a sporting event, or a tragedy, photojournalists try to capture these moments. It is a privilege for people to let us into their lives and for this we are truly grateful.