Hickory Daily Record senior photojournalist Robert C. Reed is retiring this month, marking the end of a 48-year career of chronicling the Catawba Valley.

Reed started at the Record in 1975 while he was still a student at Hickory High School.

Reflecting on his long career, Reed said the thing he will miss the opportunity the job gave him to meet people. He said he was shy at the beginning of his Record tenure and did not know how to talk to people. The job soon cured him of that.

Reed said the biggest story of his career was the 2010 murder of 10-year-old Zahra Baker and subsequent legal proceedings against Zahra’s stepmother Elisa, who pleaded guilty to the murder.

The case received international attention, giving Reed’s images of the case the largest audience he ever had.

At the same time, that side of the job – as Reed puts it, “the blood and guts, car wrecks, shootings, stabbings, murder in general, people being animals instead of human beings” – is the type of thing he won’t miss once he lays down the camera.

“The no. 1 thing I’m going to not miss is having to stick my camera lens in the face of grieving parents, which literally will sometimes bring you to tears and it has with me,” Reed said. “It’s the human side of me but I’m lucky I can hide behind a camera.”

At the same time, Reed has also focused much of his attention on capturing the small moments that define life in Hickory and the surrounding area.

“That’s the fun part of this job catching people kind of off guard, catching them in a natural moment where they weren’t really planning on having their photo shot that day but I caught ‘em,” Reed said. “I’ve got a bad tendency to always photograph first and ask questions later, which has led to some really great images and has also led to me getting chewed out.”

Reed has spent the last few months compiling a collection of such photos in advance of his retirement. These images cover a range of scenes of life in the area, and include a firefighter putting out a blaze in a vacant building, a mother and daughter trick or treating, and a Lenoir-Rhyne quarterback throwing a pass.

These are Reed’s parting shots.