From Battlefields to Butterflies: Capturing Life's Moments

If a picture is worth a thousand words, John MacDonald has about 3-million things to say. The 94-year-old, who was once a war photographer, still takes gorgeous photos. When the weather is right, you’ll find him in the yard at his daughter’s house, perched on the front porch, where he patiently and quietly awaits the perfect shot.

“That’s one of my favorites,” he said as he pulled up a photo of a hummingbird on his MacBook.

He has over 3,000 photos stored on his laptop, all organized by subject matter. “These were all taken just sitting on the chair there on that porch,” he said.

John lives with his daughter Barb and her husband in their home. It’s there that John has been receiving Angela Hospice home care services since May. Having hospice care at home has allowed John to keep living his life – and keep taking pictures.

John shows off one of his favorite photos that he's taken: a 
hummingbird drinking nectar from a butterfly bush.

“He loves showing his pictures to people,” his daughter Barb said.

Butterflies, birds, and flowers are some of his favorite subjects for photography these days, but it wasn’t always that way. He worked in a portrait studio early in his career, and he was a Marine Corps photographer during World War II.

“He developed the first picture of the planting of the flag on Iwo Jima,” Barb said. “Not the one that they put on Time Magazine. That was posed to sell war bonds. He developed the real picture.”

“The original one was the one the sergeant took,” John explained. “But by that time they had the magazine photographer there. They sent his in and it was used to sell war bonds.

“They hid the one I did. They didn’t want anybody to know that one was a fake. I was just a kid but if I had my sense about me, I would have made a couple prints to keep. But I did a lot of dumb things because I was a kid,” John continued.

But Barb and John agree it was the “smart thing” to start him on Angela Hospice’s care.

“He loves it,” Barb said. “We both do. It’s very reassuring to me.”

“Everybody that’s come here has been nice people,” John said, like his nurse Jennifer.

“She’s a nice person. She sets ups my medications for me and checks to see whether I’m still alive,” he said playfully.

He visited the Angela Hospice Care Center for a few days on respite care too, where he was busy snapping photos of the building and staff.

John got his first camera at age 14. “Back then about all you could get was a box camera,” he said.

And while that’s miles away from the digital camera and impressive telephoto lens he uses today, there’s at least one thing about taking pictures that’s been constant over the past eight decades. The reason he got into photography is the same reason he’s kept it as a hobby all these years: “I just thought it was fun,” he said.

Here are some of the photos John has taken recently: