I Married a Photographer

Dean shooting a HDR titled "The Elders"

After spending all day Saturday out in the hot sun at our daughter’s field hockey tournament, we planned to attack Sunday with unusual energy.  Constantly running between the kids’ games and practices, we find that most of our weekends are spent at the extremes of straightening the house or lounging about.   It has been a while since we all climbed in the car with nowhere to go and nothing special to see or do. So that’s exactly what we did!  Sunday in the early afternoon, all four of us and the baby (Dean’s Nikon D300) hopped in the family vehicle to a destination to where we rarely ever travel!

With nothing on our minds but a new family adventure, a hint of newness came over me.  It felt good to approach life with a fresh mind, open to explore.  We found our car slowing down around Halfway Dam; we could not resist.  Slowly we pulled the car into the parking space, I heard the gravel under the tires as we came to a stop.  The first door opened.  I felt the hot Spring air sting my face as I stepped out into the afternoon sun.  Seeing photo opportunities all the time, Dean really has become crafty in finding what angles, lighting, and lenses to use in any given situation.  It always amazes me to see him work.  He gets so into his art that my job is not to point things out to him but help him change the lenses and encourage his craft.

In order for you to view any of these images at an excellent resolution/size, you’ll need to become Dean’s contact on Flickr.  He also has posted most of the images on Facebook and JPGmag. After he took some great images of the forest near the dam, we headed up the hill to the overlook area.  This is where things got interesting!  Having little to no expectation sometimes is the best way to go about things. And in this instance it proved correct.  We got to the top of the hill where there is a narrow pull-off on the right hand side of the road. On this day it happened to be lined with cycles.  There were at least 10 bikes there whose owners stood about 20 feet away looking out over the dam talking.  Dean pulled off the road to turn around since there wasn’t a space for us to park and headed back down the hill.  As he was driving away, we talked about how the bikes would be a great untapped resource.  We ran the scenario by one another – ask the owner permission to take a photo, hand him/her a business card, send him/her a print after it has been processed and violá!  We both looked at one another and Dean did exactly what I thought he should, turned the car around.  I was getting a card ready to hand to the bike owner as Dean became excited thinking about how his shots will turn out. He could see the the HDR results in his mind’s eye and just couldn’t resist.

We parked the car and approached the slew of bikers who were laughing and clearly having nice time.  Dean singled out one fellow to ask him which person owned the bike he wanted to take a shot of – the owner agreed.   After asking us if we were cops, which I found humorous, Dean proceeded to take some amazing images.

As we wrapped up the photo session, we waved to and thanked the bikers once again. They all kind of reminded me of my Uncle Jim but that is a whole different story.   We packed up our equipment and headed off to the next destination; taking snaps of the Amish in transit to . . . uh . . . wherever they go on Sunday. Church? One culture to the next, huh?!  Looking back on the day, it was perfect in a number of ways.  Dean has illustrated to me a number of times how serious he is about doing photography full-time and when I see him work I can’t help but think that his talent is somewhat of a waste in an area that underwhelmed is the new overwhelmed.  We continue on though hoping for that shot to get published or to find that perfect studio space.  Everyday one step closer . . .