I’ve been meaning on joining the Cambridge Photowalk for ages now. I did attend one but I arrived late and pretty much tagged along with the awesome Tammy Quigley the whole time. The problem with doing the walk alongside someone else is that you don’t want to capture the same shots so you tend to hold off a bit. Today wasn’t like that.

I love hiking. Everyone who knows me knows this so it was great to head out with the Photowalk crew to the Sudden Tract, a trail system that is between Cambridge and Paris (Ontario). I arrived first, which is sometimes the case with my life, and was happy to meet some people who had done only one walk or it was their first time. It didn’t take long for people to gather around due to the cameras and I found in very short order that my Lumix was the least fancy one there. When I jokingly mentioned it, I was happy to hear that no one cared. They just were happy that I was out there sharing a passion that they had. A love for taking pictures and capturing a moment.

The light in the woods was amazing. Shining through the remaining leaves and creating fantastic shadow and light. It seemed every time you turned a bend you were walking in the glory of nature. And me having a huge desire to lead the pack on a hike really helped me to have many of those moments. I hiked and took 99 pictures. Many of them looked similar, but nearly all I was proud of. Even with having my camera set to auto, I felt that I was really able to capture the beauty of the day and everything we were seeing.

Today reminded me so much of what I love about hiking, and about taking pictures. My husband and I used to go for photo walks after we started dating. We went to Port Stanley and took pictures in the town and at the beach. We would swap back and forth with the camera and I was always amazed that we would both see something different when we looked through the lens. Today was no different as I’ve had a chance to see some of the shots people took come into facebook. I only posted my favourite one in the group, which was the teepee at the top of this post. The shot itself was the third I took of the teepee. The first two from different angles but as soon as I shifted upwards the colour just hit the right moment and I got the shot I wanted.

As you can see by the shots in this post, it doesn’t always matter what equipment you use, but how you see the world through the lens. I highly recommend getting out there and capturing what you see. You may be happy with the results!