A local Flickr group planned a Flickr walk (a photo meetup) for last Sunday and I’d been toying with the idea of attending all week. When the weekend rolled around, I wasn’t really feeling interested in taking photos but the weather was getting nicer and nicer and I was afraid if I didn’t go, I’d spend the day inside working.

Generally when I go on these photo walks, I overpack (just like I do every time I go on a trip). I’m never sure what lenses I’ll want to use and I don’t want to miss anything (!!) so I bring too much. I’ve been getting better over the months, partly dictated by the fact that the weight of camera gear adds up quickly and, many times, an hour or two into the walks, my bag has become just annoyingly heavy. Because I wasn’t really excited about taking photos this past weekend, I decided to go a different route and just brought two lenses - sort of specialty lenses - a Lensbaby and a 100mm macro.

A Lensbaby is a selective focus lens meaning that it has a very specific point of focus and lots of blur. It’s a pretty unique little gizmo and certainly not for everyone. When I first got my Lensbaby and was experimenting with it last year, I took some of the images to camera club and scored about as low as possible. I actually used to be in the “hate it” camp as well until I saw this gallery of images and fell in instant love. I haven’t really mastered the use of the Lensbaby yet because I don’t use it often but I do like some of the results.

So I headed off and met up with quite a group of other photographers. We started at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, home of the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry.

Walked around and saw some interesting sculptures (I don’t know what this one was titled but if it were mine, I called it “Lost My Mind”).

And perhaps most excitingly, saw a few flowers blooming! Minnesota really doesn’t seem to be into that transitional period that most areas experience between snow and 75 degree weather.

Then we reconvened and headed over the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge which connects the Sculpture Garden and Loring Park. The bridge is decorated with lines from a John Ashbery poem, making it a unique crossing of 16 lanes of traffic.

Also boasts something of a view of the Basilica of St. Mary.

Loring Park was idyllic. Beautiful weather, everyone was out, the ducks were happy to have somewhere liquid to park their rears and even though I still wasn’t really feeling the photos, it was just nice to be out. We eventually ended up all watching a rather large group of boys stunt riding on bikes in painfully impressive ways.

My overall photo haul from this walk was significantly smaller than usual. I probably took about a 1/3 the number of photos that I usually take and didn’t like most of them but I plan on making an effort to do more shooting on my own in the near future.