![]() I still hold these happy pockets of memories, even without photos. The kinds of moments that Ella is photographing exhaustively these days are missing from my high school photo albums. If we were teens in 2022, my high school best friend Jeff and I would have made endless videos of our backyard fireworks stunts. I remember my buddy Aaron painting my chest blue before a football game. Even though I loved photography at the time, some of my best friends from high school in the 1990s exist almost completely in my memory. My wife and I are a little jealous of that. Along with so many others in her generation who stare back at the lens’ gaze, my daughter will not wonder what her life looked like. Which of the 3,587 photos of her with the dog should I choose? Which of the 7,962 photos of her at the barn should I choose?Ĭurating those photos - the daily chronicling of my daughter’s life - made me realize how thoroughly documented her life is. The size of our image archive became clear this fall when a rite of high school senior year - the senior yearbook ad - forced me to narrow my catalog of nine bazillion images down to a handful. I crouch low with my camera, my SD card reformatted, to ensure that not even one digital image gets mangled. We have been here, whether with a cellphone camera or a digital SLR, in response to nearly every modestly significant twitch in her life arc. Snapchats sent from the backseat of a friend’s car on the way to the homecoming dance. Selfies studded with the glint of middle-school braces. Yearbook portraits posed in school cafeterias converted for a day into photo studios. We are assembling the same visual timeline for her brother, born four years later. Since that moment, Ella’s life has been a seamless series of visuals. “She … is beautiful.” The last syllable trailed off on the video footage, my grip on the camera wavering with fatherly joy. “She,” I said, my voice high-pitched and cracking with happiness. I remember my wife’s voice - fatigued and faint - asking from across the hospital room if Ella was OK. The image through the viewfinder blurred before the pixels snapped back into focus. My right finger looped around the top of the camera, toggling the lens of the camera to zoom in and capture a close-up. When I glanced away from the LCD screen of the video camera, I could tell that her first gasps were healthy because the delivery nurse was smiling at Ella while checking her vitals. She lay, eyes clenched in struggle, on a neonatal warming bed in an Overland Park hospital. Seventeen years ago, I pointed a gleaming silver camcorder at my newborn daughter as she alternated breathing and screaming during her first moments of life. Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the University of Kansas. The Daily Reflector partners with educators and local businesses to encourage literacy, to broaden students’ community and global perspectives and to equip area teachers with a powerful tool for teaching.Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. The NIE program promotes literacy through the use of the daily newspaper as an instructional aid in the classroom. Newspapers are distributed to Pitt County Schools as well as East Carolina University and Pitt Community College through the NIE program. This program relies on contributions through fundraising efforts and sponsors. The Daily Reflector also administers the Newspapers in Education (NIE) Program. The Daily Reflector prints 16,500 papers each day, including more than 11,000 home delivery subscriptions. The Daily Reflector has since expanded its coverage to all of Pitt County and the surrounding areas. In 1885, David Jordan Whichard became sole owner and publisher of the Reflector, beginning daily publication Dec. Moving the equipment into their mother's one-room schoolhouse, the brothers began their own weekly newspaper, The Eastern Reflector. Whichard, who bought the printing equipment from the proprietor of The Express, for whom they once worked. The company was founded in 1882 by David Jordan Whichard and Julian R. The Daily Reflector has been a vital part of the life of Greenville, Pitt County and eastern North Carolina for more than a century.
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