Photographer's parting shots of Mount St. Helens live on

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http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/dec/ ... roll-film/

Photographer's parting shots of Mount St. Helens live on

They're brand new images of a Northwest icon that disappeared more than 33 years ago — the conical summit of Mount St. Helens.

Reid Blackburn took the photographs in April 1980 during a flight over the simmering volcano.

When he got back to The Columbian studio, Blackburn set that roll of film aside. It was never developed.

On May 18, 1980 — about five weeks later — Blackburn died in the volcanic blast that obliterated the mountain peak.

Those unprocessed black-and-white images spent the next three decades coiled inside that film canister. The Columbian's photo assistant Linda Lutes recently discovered the roll in a studio storage box, and it was finally developed.

When Fay Blackburn had a chance to see new examples of her husband's work, she recalled how he was feeling left out during all that volcano excitement.

"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."

(continued, by printing your digital shots out before the collapse of the industrial civilization you might have your name recalled too?)