A funny thing happens when you transition from shooting as a hobby to shooting as a profession. You find yourself seldomly shooting things for leisure anymore! Yes, one would think that the more you hone your shooting skills and the more upgrades you make to your equipment, the more amazing and compelling your images become. Not always so! In fact, some of our most compelling images were taken when we first picked up photography using my Canon Rebel XT and Daniel’s Nikon F80 film camera! Granted they probably weren’t the most tack sharp, spot on images from a technical standpoint, but that’s just the beauty of it! When your mind isn’t occupied with camera settings or gear, you can allow your eye to breathe and captivate the most amazing things!

With that being said, we finally had an opportunity to do a little leisurely shooting yesterday when we joined our friends Emerson and Elena at the New York Botanical Garden. On top of that, we even had a chance to give them both a mini photo class on how to shoot a camera in manual mode. Needless to say, the two of them picked up our teachings fast and came back with some pretty sweet images!

Here are some of our captures from the garden using our 60mm f/2.8 macro lens. This bad boy allows you to shoot so close, you can smell the flowers while you’re taking photos. Yum!