A tribute to my Dad on his Birthday. A look at the photography of Michael Edward Ford

Today is my Father's Birthday. He would have been 71.  A year ago today we found out that he had cancer. He passed away on April 10th of this year. I think about him ever second of every day. I think about all of the wonderful things he taught me and how much he would have loved to share those things  with my son Julian. How to ride a motorcycle, how to play golf, a love for animals, a love for nature and being outdoors. I could go on, but out of all of the things my Dad shared with me, one thing has had the most impact on my life. He taught me to appreciate a good photograph. He always had a camera with him and took amazing photographs of our childhood. We had a very large scrapbook for every year of our life. These were not normal scrapbooks, they were the size of a human torso. I have great memories of him putting them together and being excited to share them with us when ever he would add new pages. My sister and I would sit on the sofa with them spread across our laps flipping through the pages until our legs would go numb. He also had scrapbooks going back to his childhood. Unfortunately we lost a large majority of those pictures in a house fire when I was in middle school. He always kept the negatives at his office, but had recently moved them back home when we had the fire, so they were lost too. He spent many years after that peeling apart charred pages just to salvage one or two pictures, he would clean them up and scan them. Some doubles that were given to us were survived. After a house fire you think about all of the material things that you loose and they are all replaceable, everything but the photographs. He gave me my first" real camera" when I graduated college. It was a Pentax K1000. I believe it was the last year they were produced. He wanted me to have one, because he knew it was a classic. I cant really say that he taught me a lot about the technical side of photography. He said " get the needle in the middle and shoot". I had mixed results with that camera and with that technique, but every now and then I would get one that would take my breathe away. At some point I put that camera on the shelf and fell into using a compact automatic camera. I probably would have stayed on that path but I knew that the pictures that I was taking were not comparing to all of the great pictures from my childhood. None of them were even close. I finally dusted off the Pentax and took a photography class, and have been learning and getting better ever since. Although I have a small collection of cameras now, that Pentax K1000 is still my favorite, because  Dad gave it to me. Every time I pick up a camera I am still just trying to take pictures as good as Dad. Today I want to share some of the Dad's photographs. Thank you again Dad, for teaching my to love a good photograph.

Old School Selfie using a mirror

Happy Birthday Dad

We Miss You