Photo Walk

This past summer, my friend Mandi got a new camera, the Nikon D40. Her husband bought it for her, hoping if she owned a good camera it would save he and the kids from the biannual family portrait with "The Picture People." She brought the camera with her to the spray park and snapped pictures of the kids as they squealed and ran across the wet cement on their tip toes. Mandi, knowing I like cameras offered to let me take a few shots with it. I refused, knowing my own clumsiness and foreseeing myself dropping the camera before she's taken a week's worth of pictures with it. On that bright July afternoon, she captured two perfect moments in time, one of Elizabeth and one of Kai. From that day on, I wanted one too, much like my longing for pink high tops in 6th grade, somehow I would just have to get that camera.

I didn't need to wait long. Fate stepped in and I dropped my own camera one afternoon. A piece broke off and after several trips to different camera shops, it was deemed "un-fixable." For the record, I tapped into my resourceful nature and found that if I used a push pin at just the right angle, I could still get the shutter to work for the occasional photograph.

This Christmas, "Santa" brought our family a brand-new Nikon D40! So now I just need to figure out how to use the fantastic thing! Just holding it in my hands thrills me. I forgot, until my tingling hands reminded me, just how I longed for a good camera as a teenager. I did end up with a pretty nice Pentax model that I used for years, until the same thing happened, the shutter button fell off and no one wanted to fix or find the part for an "older" model. So I stopped taking many pictures for awhile.

Yesterday, as Elizabeth, Kai and I bundled ourselves up in scarves, hats and boots, to go on our "Photo-walk", I realized I had not done so since high school. I remember Sunday mornings after church, changing out of the an uncomfortable church outfit and sliding on jeans, a sweater and tennis shoes and then getting behind the elephant gray steering wheel of the Pontiac and driving to various forest preserves. My feet crunched pale khaki gravel as I strode my way through the woods, feeling like an adolescent red riding hood, trying to find my way to the perfect shot instead of Grandmother's house.

Once taken completely alone, I took my first "adult" photo walk with both kids in tow. Kai grabbed the biggest stick he could find and swung it back and forth about 4 steps behind me, and Elizabeth wrote down items she found beautiful in a tiny notebook meant to clip onto a backpack. "Look Mommy! Leaves in water! Isn't that pretty? Here, let me write that down."

Here are a couple of photos we came up with: