Pat Little isn’t exaggerating when he guesses he has “probably over a million” photo negatives at his home, the tangible record of nearly 50 years as a professional photographer. He’s got a sense of humor about the significance of that number.

“It means one thing,” he says with a laugh. “It means you’re old.”

He couldn’t have imagined that sort of output back in 1977 when, encouraged by a friend, he walked into the Daily Collegian office in the middle of his senior year to try out for a spot on the photo staff. He was late to pick up a camera, but Little ’77 Lib has more than made up for it in the nearly half century since.

If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’re familiar with his work. From his time on the Collegian staff to his tenure as a Centre Daily Times staff photographer from 1982 to 2000 and on to his stint as a contract photographer for the Associated Press from 2000 to 2010, Little has likely done more than anyone to document the people, places, major events, and everyday life in and around University Park. (He also shot a number of Penn Stater covers over the years.)

Last fall, not long after he reclaimed nearly two decades’ worth of his negatives from the CDT, he began digitizing those images using a high-quality scanner; when we spoke in January, he was up to the year 1989. He knows the project will take years, but he insists “it’s not work, because I enjoy it—I love picking them out. I basically have a daily history of Centre County from 1982 to 2000. I went to everything, and I want these to survive.”

The photos featured here are among the hundreds he’s posted and shared on Facebook, inspiring countless comments from alumni grateful for the black-and-white reminders of their time in Happy Valley. “There are all these things that people remember, and it touches a nerve for somebody,” he says.

Little’s first Collegian assignment—really, an informal tryout—was a Penn State gymnastics meet at Rec Hall. Enough of those shots impressed the newspaper’s photo editor, who handed him a roll of film (kids, ask your parents) and sent him to shoot a bicycle surplus auction on campus. From there, he learned how to develop prints. “After that,” he says, “I was stone-cold hooked.”

That July, he drove to Johnstown to document the devastating floods that inundated the city, walking the streets in water that was chest-high in places, with his camera bag held above his head. A few months later, he met the photo editor for Time magazine at a national photography convention in Washington, D.C.; his photos from the flood earned him a freelancing gig with the magazine, which eventually ran one of his photos of President Jimmy Carter fly fishing in nearby Spruce Creek.

He got a newspaper job in Philadelphia not long after, at which he learned two invaluable lessons: how to shoot sports (more on that below), and that he didn’t like living in a big city. A year later, he returned to his native Centre County, where he opened his own studio and freelanced for the Associated Press and CDT before the local paper eventually offered him a job.

He shot everything in and around State College, which naturally included lots of Penn State—football and other sports, of course, but also memorable snippets of everyday life. Sharing them on Facebook, he says, made one thing clear. “What gets the most reaction are the street scenes. People remember the places that were there, or people pick themselves out. That and football—I have a couple of former players who go through the sideline shots and pick everybody out.”

Nittany Lion football provided Little with his largest audience; he documented the program during a wildly successful stretch that included two national championships in the 1980s. Naturally, his primary responsibility on Saturdays at Beaver Stadium was capturing game action. A mentor in his first newspaper job in Philly taught him the secret of success. “He never missed anything, and he said, ‘That’s because I work harder than everybody else,” Little says. “So, I studied the game, studied the teams, so that I knew where to be and where to look. I shot well over 200 Penn State football games, and I shot them like a coach.”

He also captured thousands of images of the coach. “For the first 15 years I shot him, Joe didn’t know who I was,” Little says. “Eventually, he knew my name. We’d be allowed into practices up on the Astroturf, and after a certain time they’d cut us off. So Joe would just turn and yell, ‘Little, get out of here.’ He wouldn’t even see me.

“Some time after that, I’d go to his press conferences at Beaver Stadium, and my job was done when he was, so I’d walk out of the stadium with him, and we’d talk a bit.” It’s one warm memory among so many others, and like his photos, Little is more than happy to share.