After years of hiatus from shooting, I purchased my first “real”digital camera.   It was a Canon Rebel XT.  Pretty much a baseline DSLR, and I bought it used with a couple of lenses.  $300 bucks.  Not bad for a “starter kit.”  Instant love.  I was clickin’ everything in sight!

I learned very fast that while it’s imperative to know composition, to understand light, to be able to capture a moment before your eye… contrary to what some would try to lead you to believe, EQUIPMENT IS IMPORTANT!!!  A lesson I quickly learned as the images I took with the XT had far to much noise, and I’ll cross that bridge in later posts!

But, on this day… I was out with my new-to-me Canon XT camera at the UK Arboretum in Lexington, my home town.  I wandered down one path then another, finally coming to a small pond with a small waterfall.  There was another person there taking pictures of the pond and falls!  We discussed and cussed about how to make the waterfall silky, how to work the light, how to work our cameras!!! We both were just getting into digital and it was new.

This is how I came to meet Terry Bailey.  Quite soon, we starting going shooting together in what we called “getting lost!”  We’d jump in her Toyota Prius and just drive… making up our mind at each one lane backroad turn which way to go based on what the horizon promised and our gut instincts growled.  Hundreds and hundreds of back-road Kentucky miles we traveled and shot!

Many of those shots will follow, but for this post…

I took an image of a water lily that first day at the Arboretum… this is an image I made a few months later with my “upgraded” camera at the same locale.   To this day one the images I have made that I love the most.