Most of my friends know my creation photography best, and that will be the topic of my next blog post, the second in my “Second Wind” series. But I had to interrupt that series to share a different kind of adventure and photography that I also love.

This past week, I spent three days in Rhode Island, mostly in Providence with an afternoon in Newport. My photographer friend Aaron Perkins was also on hand. We are both Episcopal deacons and attending our national triennial conference.

So… of course, I had to get my “city fix,” doing the kind of photography I don’t often get to do in Northeast Louisiana. Yes, I “conferenced,” but I have learned well how to grab an hour here and there between conference events to go out with the camera.

One of the things I love to photograph in the city is people at work in the streets. Due to a miscommunication with a city bus driver, I got off a bus about a mile too soon. So I walked, pulling my luggage, and as I approached the conference hotel, the first thing that caught my eye was a man in a cherry picker replacing bulbs and grungy globes on the lamp posts in front of the hotel.

I rushed into the lobby, parked my luggage, dug out my camera and rushed back outside. He was still there! I waved my camera, he smiled and kept working.

Being one of the host deacons, Aaron had to work a lot but he grabbed about an hour and a half to “photowalk” with me on the Brown University campus. Architecture is another of my fave subjects and beautiful old buildings offer luscious details of workmanship.

I do try to photograph entire buildings or facades or parts of buildings. I don’t think I’m as good at that as I am at seeing details, but occasionally I get something I’m willing to share!

Saturday 250 Episcopal deacons piled into buses and spent the afternoon in Newport. I will never pass up a chance to see an ocean, so I and a few others headed for the Cliff Walk. Again, landscape photography is not my greatest strength, but…. when I quit trying to capture the magnificence of this planet with a camera, you, my friends, will know: I’m ready to go home to meet the Maker of it all.