By Carrie Frye – Staff Writer

Click goes the camera, and a twist of the wrist advances the roll of film or at least that is the sound a lot of photographers remember. Those were the days of 35mm film and developing negatives, and are the days Chris Christiansen, 90, of Seven Lakes remembers well.

“I started with photography in high school. I was raised in California and my dad worked at a studio, so I got all the film I wanted,” he recalls.

Christiansen learned how to develop his own film, and up until five years ago still had a dark room in his home to do so. Although he has made the digital transition, he still believes film is the best way to capture black and white photos, especially for photo competitions, like one recently hosted by the Sandhills Photography Club. Christiansen has been a member of the club since 1984 when it was new with only a handful of members.

Although Christiansen’s formal occupation was a mechanical engineer, his photography hobby grew up with him and with his daughter, Jill Margeson, 64. Once she retired, she had the time to focus on her hobby more than before and joined her father in the photo club.

“I love being outdoors, but you probably need to be a naturalist to be a photographer. I don’t think I would have noticed all the detail without doing photography,” says Margeson.

She is currently taking a course online in photomontage, taking different backgrounds with foregrounds and blending the two together using Photoshop.

“I was taking pictures and ‘seeing mountains’ in the pollen that had collected on the lake. I also like taking photos of rusted cars altering the light, or using photos of dogwood with the rust. That can be very artsy,” she says.

The father daughter pair also takes trips just for the enjoyment of taking pictures. A first trip to Arizona used about ten rolls of film, but a more recent trip with a digital camera netted 6,000 photographs.

Christiansen enjoys taking photos of birds, especially hummingbirds.

“We were just down in South America and took another 6,000 pictures,” he says smiling.

His favorite specimen there was the Long-tailed Sylph hummingbird in its natural habitat.

Both father and daughter work with macro or close-up photography. Christiansen even builds cages for raising insects such as a butterflies or a praying mantis egg cluster for the purpose of macro photography that can be small enough to fit on a postage stamp. The downside being that conditions are important with macro photography. Wind and light have to be just right for that perfect picture.

“Taking photos is a very pleasant pastime, but it can use an awful lot of time, so that’s the only problem,” he jokes.

Margeson focuses on the friendships that this hobby has enabled her to develop like those with her fellow members of the photography club.

“Chris and Jill have truly an amazing father/daughter relationship. Chris supports, instructs, assists and guides Jill in all facets of photography as he does with all photographers,” says Len Barnard, president of the Sandhills Photography Club.

And there is no doubt that the joy of photography and sharing it continue with Margeson and her own children and grandchildren. The only question left may be just what these “avid amateurs” will do with all of those collections of photographs. Until that answer comes, this pair can still be found out and about shooting their next best set of photos.