THE world of press photography, on a local level at least, has changed out of all recognition in the last 15 years.

Now every man, woman and their dog is able to take decent images on mobile phones without much effort and send them on to newspapers, so there's less scope for characters like Ken Upton.

Ken, always affable and avuncular, who knew the job inside out and then outside in, was one of the leading local press photographers in south Worcestershire for more than a quarter of a century. He was chief photographer at the Evesham Journal for 18 years, before moving over to Worcester to become picture editor of Berrow's Group and the Worcester Evening News in the mid-1980s. He remained here until 1991 when he left to set up his own business.

Sadly Ken died in 2008 but he left behind a wonderful legacy of the life of a press photographer in the black and white days, when photographic diaries were full of assignments from golden weddings to "snatches" of criminals outside court and rolls of celluloid film magically came to life in "dev tanks" in the darkroom.

However, many of the photographs that Ken stashed away have only just come to light, discovered by his daughter Kate as she conducted a clear out of the family home at Elmley Castle. "Mum died last year and so we've decided to put the place on the market," she explained. "But my parents had lived there for 30 years and so there was quite a lot of stuff to go through. In fact there were the contents of three lofts and an attic."

Among the flotsam of family life, she came across a cardboard box containing about 100 of her father's old photographs.

Kate added: "There was no obvious reason he kept what he did. Many of the pictures had information attached to them saying where they were taken and what they were about, but others came with no details and no indication of why Dad had kept them. Several seemed quite random shots, but maybe they meant something to him or he liked them for a particular reason or perhaps they just got kept along with the others. We'll never know now."

For anyone who was around the area in the Sixties and Seventies, the photographs are wonderfully nostalgic, featuring as they do, some of the characters of the time. For example there are several shots of the flamboyant Member of Parliament Sir Gerald Nabarro, who represented Kidderminster for 14 years, then suffered a serious illness in 1964, recovered and turned up again to succeed Sir Peter Agnew in South Worcestershire in 1966. He lived in considerable style in a lovely house in Broadway High Street and his fleet of cars all had personal number plates long before such individualism became popular. He cornered the market in any beginning with NAB and at one time had every one from NAB 1 to NAB 7.

Ken's skill as a photographer and an eye for the unusual was never better illustrated than by a picture he took in 1970 of Brandy, a Boxer dog, which had made friends with a fox, which presumably was wild, and, of course, nicknamed Foxey. There is also a lovely one taken in the same year of the vicar of Evesham baptising young Martin Sandalls. Apparently Master Sandalls had played up so much in church, the ceremony had to aborted. Not to be defeated, the vicar called round to the family home and baptised Martin as he sat in his bath.

On the flip side of the job was the chilling aftermath of a train crash at Ashchurch, near Tewkesbury in 1969, when Ken photographed a young policeman climbing a ladder to search the wreckage for bodies. Two people had been killed and many were injured. The scene looks all the grimmer for being in black and white. The many sides of photography at the sharp end.