“He did express his frustration. He was on a night rotation,” Blackburn, The Columbian’s editorial page assistant, said. While other staffers were booking flights to photograph Mount St. Helens, “He was shooting high school sports.”
When his shift rotated around, “He was excited to get into the air,” Fay Blackburn said.
Columbian microfilm shows Reid Blackburn was credited with aerial photos of Mount St. Helens that ran on April 7 and April 10.
He would have shot that undeveloped roll on one of those assignments. Maybe he didn’t feel the images were up to his standards. Maybe he didn’t trust the camera; it was the only roll he shot with that camera on the flight.
But he would have had more than one camera, said former Columbian photographer Jerry Coughlan, who worked with Blackburn at the newspaper.
“We all had two or three cameras,” set up for a variety of possibilities. Riding in a small plane, “You didn’t want to be fumbling for lenses,” Coughlan said.
Former Columbian reporter Bill Dietrich teamed up with Blackburn during one of those early April flights over the volcano.
“Reid was a remarkable gentleman, with the emphasis on gentle,” Dietrich said. “He was an interested human being, with a great eye. He saw stuff.
“As a reporter, that’s a great thing about working with photographers. They see things,” Dietrich said.
“The newsroom was so electrified when the volcano first awoke. It was an international story in the backyard of a regional newspaper,” said Dietrich, who now writes historical fiction and Northwest environmental nonfiction. “We were all pumped up and fascinated.”
He took it to a Portland photo supply company, which outsources black-and-white film to a freelancer.
When he got it back and saw the film-sized images, “I was astonished to see how well the film showed up,” Wayrynen said.
And then there was the content. Blackburn could have photographed anything on that roll, Wayrynen said.
“When I saw aerials of Mount St. Helens — a long-gone landscape — It was beyond my expectations,” he said.
This is the second time people have tried to coax images from film that Blackburn left behind.