What a fine dilemma is my choosing the best photo I've ever taken. Many of the photos I've taken are part of a newspaper archive somewhere and not available to me.  As the years go by, the memory of those images fade, losing shape and vividness in my mind. I remember the moment of the news story. Always smiling children in Maine, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Alabama and of course, smiling children with their pets.  My husband says I was the queen of feature shots with dogs and cats and other assorted furry or be-whiskered creatures. These contrast with the hard news photographs I have taken over the decades. Fires. Crime scenes. Natural  disasters. And then there were the photo essays--for example, one that focused on  an oyster fisherman and his boat, one of the line that was the era of skipjacks on the Chesapeake. What about my farmers: corn farmers, potato farmers, or the migrants who worked on those farms?There are artists, their hands on canvas or wood.  Veterans on a vintage B-17. I love nature and my camera is usually with me. The ant on the peony. That is a favorite. Or spiders in dew-soaked webs. It is hard for me not to choose one of the two images that captured phantom faces--the French-looking woman in the mist of Niagara Falls or the wood nymph on the side of a barn in Cooperstown. Those two photos with that incalculable mix of shadow and light share a photographic mystery for me that begs of  Da Vinci's "I see faces everyway," concept of imagination. Of course, I also have an artistic, not so journalistic thematic point of view: faces, doors, windows. The idea of openings and how we enter spaces fascinates me. Many of my images are centered on that theme. Everywhere I go, these images are sought out. That might work here. So many stories. So many photographs.  There is also the possibility that the best photograph you have ever taken should be one that is closest to your emotional heart of hearts, not necessarily the most aesthetic or brilliant.  Here I mean, not a prize winner except in your own contest.  I must choose and like the knight in the Indiana Jones film, "The Last Crusade," I must choose wisely. I choose then for this day a photograph of my father, Jean Paul Audet,  at his TV station, WMDT, when life was strong and good for him. Before his woes and sorrows. It is a way I like to remember him.  And with Thanksgiving tomorrow, I am thankful I had, have him for a father--despite the heartache and the difficulties that as a child you hold as a standard against all of the failings you perceive in your sire.  So for his bravery in that last year in the 1980s and what I know was love for his family, this is the best photo I have ever taken.