Bright Idea

Ideas are central to my lifestyle.  I am a creator of imagery, and when I am between client jobs I must come up with the ideas, and the props to make my stock photography shoots work.  This image was created on this very basic part of my life.  I love to use lightbulbs to demonstrate ideas, and even thought this design is becoming retro with technological advances, I love the cool blue color of the glass.

This is actually one of my best selling images, and has a variety of uses.  For me the bulb in the grass represents my ideas of places I want to go in the future.  From local parks, and attractions on my to-do list to far off places I would like to visit in the future.  It is a great stock image for my collection because it has personal meaning in my life, but at the same time is a generic image that can be used in countless applications.

I often take a part of my Friday to plan at least one new adventure for the weekend.  Last weekend it was as simple as finding a new park to take a hike in - and on Saturday we were off to Caw Caw Nature and Interpretive Center.  The Charleston, SC area is full of these parks that are either free or $1 or $2 per person to get in and have a variety of trails.  When I do my searches for places to visit I always look for how long the trails are.  At Caw Caw the 6 miles of trails we perfect for my husband and I because we like to do a 2 hour walk when we adventure out.  We ended up at 1 hour and 45 minutes which was close enough since it was getting hot, but we could have repeated one of the trails to get in the last 15 minutes if we went again.  What I really liked about Caw Caw was #1 the GIANT alligator we saw, and #2 all the trails were circles.

I love circle trails because we can repeat trails that we like, which we often do in locations that do not have as many total miles available.  Another park that we go to locally with a good variety of circular trails is  Wannamaker County Park in North Charleston.  They only have 2 miles of trails, but they are all circles and run into each other so it is like walking in a large maze.  We weave in and out until we get in a good hike.  Some trails in this park are paved, and some are natural.  We have found that by sticking to the smaller natural trails we rarely come across other hikers on our little adventures - which is a bonus for us because we often use this time to talk about personal matters!

My work often inspires my everyday life, and this is one example of an image that continues to inspire new adventures.