BY RYAN E. SMITH
BLADE STAFF WRITER
There’s something magical about a camera, the way looking through it changes one’s view of the world and how with one click it can freeze time. Few know that better than Herral Long, a photojournalist with The Blade for more than 50 years.
“I’ve been, since early on, just mystified by the ability to just press a button and capture reality,” he says.
The Toledo native, who started working for the paper in 1949 and has photographed every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, called his distinguished career to a close last month. The people, places, and ideas that he recorded, however, remain as vivid as ever.
Nothing stopped Mr. Long, 79 — clad in a vest practically bursting with lenses, notebooks and more — from capturing the perfect photo. And not just for the big stories. He kept his eye and mind open to small-town folk and simple pleasures too, always managing to imbue his work with emotion, capturing a world of meaning in a look or a glance.
The results speak for themselves. Mr. Long was voted the first Still Photographer of the Year in 1967 by the Ohio News Photographers Association and twice received its highest honor, the Carson Memorial Award. One of his photographs was chosen by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its fifth annual international exhibition, Photography in the Fine Arts.
Perhaps the greatest tribute, though, is the pure, childlike pleasure Mr. Long gets when he catches something precious and fleeting through his lens. As he writes in an upcoming book of his photos, The Long View: 50 Years as a Photojournalist, “The decisive moment that makes an image — it’s like catching butterflies.”
Originally published in The Blade on Sunday, January 4, 2009
A look back at some of the retired Blade photographer's favorite work
Herral Long early in his career as a photographer.