I was about four years old when I took my first photograph, back when the Las Vegas strip consisted of a few casinos with hitching posts in front.
Every Saturday my parents would drive from Henderson to Las Vegas. My mother would go grocery shopping and my father would head for the Silver Dollar Casino to play poker. (He was a brilliant mathematician and man of few but important words. He usually won the grocery money.)
One afternoon, we were standing outside the window of the Silver Dollar Casino watching my dad and three other men inside at a poker table. My mother handed me one of those Kodak Brownie box cameras and told me to take a picture.
In the 1980s, I was going through my father’s personal things and found that photograph. My dad was sitting around the poker table with his buddies — cowboy hats, cigarettes and six guns lying on the table.
Even though I was very young, I clearly remember the day, and I’ve treasured the photograph ever since I found it. In this digital age, many of us capture more images than we can store and manage, but film was precious then.
This is a perfect example of how capturing a priceless moment in time can preserve its emotion forever.
Leave a Reply