Red Dirt Diaries: Edmond Photographer Retiring After 30+ Years

An Edmond woman has captured generations of smiles on film, but soon, she will snap her last studio picture. She's now hoping all those moments in time aren't gone forever.

Karen Moore has developed a gift after 31 years behind the camera.

“No matter how cranky a child was, I could always get a child to do something for me,” Moore said.

Her patience was unwavering, even when her subject wanted to relive senior yearbook poses.

Inside her Edmond studio, Moore showed News 9 the friendships cemented with smiles, decades of them.

Of all her pictures, one of a baby, which was taken a month before he passed away, stood out most.

But at the moment, it's lost, misplaced among the boxes of prints, and props now for sale because Karen Moore Studios is closing.

Moore blames in part technology. Amateur photographers have turned into instant experts in a snap.

All of Moore's work has been reduced to a back closet, where she keeps all her negatives, CD's, and photos from schools, weddings, and major life events, now tucked away.

“If nobody comes and wants them, we'll have to burn them. That's not going to be fun,” she said.

Instead she's giving away free of charge all the negatives to those she's photographed through the years.

She also giving away one framed picture to the parents who let her capture some of the final moments they had with their daughter.

“It's important to me because I got to help preserve it,” Moore explained.

After 31 years of preserving moments in time, saying goodbye has never seemed so hard.

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