Special Recognition Category- Physical Disability
Paul Klear

I’ve always been interested in photography. It started as a teenager. I usually took 35mm slides. I even had a dark room at a time where I would develop my own film. Back then it was film. I had a SLR and a couple of telephoto lenses. It later progressed to digital photography. I have a Cannon DSLR. My wife loved photography as much as I did. In the 51 years we were married I took over 4000 photographs with my wife of family and travels. I’ve been doing photo restoration for about 10 years, restoring old photographs, removing stains and cracks, and enhancing the photos using a photoshop program. I continued that until my wife passed away two years ago. I started losing my vision about a year and a half after my wife passed away. First the left eye, then soon after the right eye. My vision has been degrading, but fortunately I still have a lot of my vision. When I started losing my eye sight, I knew it was going to get worse and scary. The creative arts have always been important to my mental well-being. I thought that I was going to stop doing everything that I used to enjoy but coming to blind rehab it has opened my eyes both figuratively and realistically to what is still possible. I received a computer with a special program for vision loss. It has allowed me to magnify and view the images for photo editing.