Doug Graham was a hell of a photographer, but he was also that rarest of things: A fully realized human being.

He was serious about his job and his craft, working at both CQ and Roll Call and then the combined CQ Roll Call until 2014, helping launch Loudoun Now and winning an Emmy for the American Routes project. But talk to his friends and colleagues and they invariably come back to stories about his life with his wife Dawn and daughter Lizzie, his love of the outdoors, especially his beloved Virginia woods, bicycling and motorcycling, and, always, his ability to laugh and find the absurd and silly in virtually any situation.

Doug’s death on Sunday at the age of 65, from cancer, rocked the Roll Call family. Ever the journalist, he documented how he lived with his illness on Loudoun Now and social media. Knowing what was coming did not make it any easier for any of us when we got the news. At Roll Call, we lost a colleague who epitomized the publication’s approach to covering the news with skill, skepticism and joy. Doug would get the shot — and still plant a whoopee cushion on your chair.

I can still hear his laugh. And I’m not alone.

“It’s late spring of the year 2000. I was working as the chief photographer for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., when my then-wife Holly got a job at The Washington Post. While looking for employment myself, I ran across a listing for a three-day-a-week, part-time, temporary job at Roll Call. I call Doug, the photo editor at Roll Call, to see if he’ll give me some work,” current Photo Editor Bill Clark recalled.

“Let me pause here to say that Doug was quite the practical joker. You see, Doug had recently been fired by Dave Rapp from his staff photographer position at Congressional Quarterly. … So Doug answered the phone and said, ‘You should call Scott Ferrell at Congressional Quarterly,’ fully knowing that Scott would be confused and amused by Doug’s referral. I did get the Roll Call position. Thus began my 26-year relationship with Doug, whom I consider my mentor. As I told Doug last week during my final visit with him, he is the reason I am where I am. He gave me a job at a publication that I fell in love with,” Clark said.

For Roll Call Senior Photographer Tom Williams, he and Doug bonded not just over the work but their similar background.

“Doug was our photo editor for over a decade but my memories drift to canoeing the Shenandoah, late night drinking at the conventions, and him calling my father to discuss hunting, fishing and motorcycles because they were both country boys,” Williams said.

He kept the work in perspective, pushing his team to get the best shot while keeping eyes open for what was around the corner.

“It was more of a partner-in-crime relationship and he was always our greatest champion, encouraged us to take chances, and not worry about missing a picture because the reward was great if you hit it,” Williams said.

Doug’s reach as a journalist goes far. His photos of everything from everyday life in the Capitol to the backroads of Virginia dot our history, from the Library of Congress to Getty Images to Loudoun Now to our own newsroom archives.

He was up for anything; I mean, he even asked me to collaborate on a photography book on Cyclo-cross racing. (I bike all the time, but I knew nothing about Cyclo-cross. That didn’t matter to Doug. He supplied the images and believed in me that I was good for the words. He got the best out of everyone.)

And again, man, he knew how to make people laugh.

“In 2008, we were staying at a Motel 6 in the Denver suburbs while covering [then-candidate Barack Obama’s Democratic National] convention. Doug and I got back to the motel at 2 a.m. after a very long day covering the convention, and nothing was open for food except for the 24-hour drive-thru window at Wendy’s across the road. After a quick break for what’s now legal in Colorado—we’ll call it night skiing—we walked over to the drive-thru for our dinner, having no car. The server laughed, while we laughed and apologized for not having a car. It’s a memory full of laughter, and how I choose to remember Doug,” Clark said.

Same.