Dad would have been 91 today. I tell friends that the elder SMW haunts both my Facebook when I post photos and camera when I go out on my long constitutionals. Being the oldest of his brood, I was the first son to go to work with him and learn the mysteries, techniques and technology of 35mm and larger format photography.
In some ways it’s regrettable that photography has become so easy that anybody with a phone can do it. Even as I entered adulthood, the bar was very high. Like all pros of his generation, Saul had to work to get good images and that work was all the difference between being a professional photographer or even a serious hobbyist and being a snapshot-shooting shutterbug.
While he admired Ansel Adams, Dad didn’t see himself as an artist, but as a disciplined technician. Self-taught, at one point having used his parents’ bathroom as a makeshift darkroom, Saul became an official Registered Biological Photographer and the two, almost three decade Chief of Medical Media at the Pittsburgh area VA hospitals. His anatomy slide collection served as a test-cram resource for young doctors in making as they sat for their finals.
It wasn’t like he was totally old-school. He had Macs in his office and was beginning to make the transition with his newly learned digital skills. A quick study at first, I silently and sadly marked his cognitive decline by his increasing frustration and decreasing ability to bend the computers to his will. He made that connection late in his career and it frustrated him as he declined. After a while he gave up, but his trusty long-lensed Nikon was as much an extension of him as … one of his hands. (Keepin’ it G-rated 
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Dad loved what he did and would have worked forever if he could have. He and I are much alike in that. Now those old-school skills, his skills, are largely anachronisms, but the discipline, the effort to learn, the mutual love of light frozen in time are retained and inextricably woven into my best, most luminous memories of my father. When I stop, when an image from my daily journey catches my eye, there’s an unseen, gentle ghost who haunts the captured moment.
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