His father Dave and grandfather Guy had been photographers for The Evening Star, now Allied Press' The Star, and so he grew up with images that made the news.
"As kids, we lived with all these photos in a drawer in the sitting room."
An image from the Hyde railway disaster in 1943 has no photographer's byline on it but "I know for sure it is Dad's".
"It was a pretty traumatic thing to cover."
At that stage, the Pickard family lived in Dunedin, and Mr Pickard, now of Omakau, travelled to many assignments with his father.
They included sports matches, the Alexandra Blossom Festival, skating on the natural ice around Central Otago and many others, but the thing he remembered most were horse races, usually at Wingatui.
"When Dad went to a race meeting, he would take photos of the horse finishing the race, then race down to where the jockey and horse came in, the birdcage, to take photos then race back to the Star office in Dunedin where he had about one and a-half hours to process [the photos] before printing.
"The photography in those days was a bit different than now. For example, the photographers in those days made their own negatives. They used glass plates that they put different stuff called emulsion on, then they sensitised the plates ... he would make up 50 plates, for example, then haul them up to a job, without breaking them, load them on to the camera and then he only had 50 goes to get the shot. There was no deletion."
He said his father worked for The Evening Star from the early 1930s until about 1974, with the exception of two years when he served in the air force at the end of World War 2, shortly after taking the photo of the Hyde railway disaster and shortly before the paper became The Star.
His grandfather worked for the paper from 1905 until 1965.
The Focal Point exhibition, which celebrates 150 years of the Otago Daily Times, is on at Alexandra's Central Stories Museum until July 29.
