Sara’s Garden Center

If you haven’t had a chance to check out my last post about how I got into photography, feel free to go read that, or at least go back to see the pictures of the progression of work.

Today we’re going to talk about a local shop that I feel is very underrated, and that’s Sara’s Garden Center in Brockport NY.

I know when people go out to buy plants and flowers for their home gardens they already have an idea of how they want it to look, but one of the things I’ve always failed at myself is take that visualization in my head and put it on paper or actually visualize it in the real world. The beauty of Sara’s Garden Center is they actually have a full garden area just outside their shop that they set up with varioius plants and flowers for you to see how they would look together. Whether it be various colors of Daliahs, Tulips, Hydrangeas, or the many species of geraniums they will plant them out in their gardens for the public to see. It’s quite a beautiful site.

They also have a small pond on site that they have water plants in, but in my last few visits I haven’t seen any lillies blossomed and it seems to be a bit more cluttered with old plant waste. Granted all of that does provide a great home to some amphibious creatures that call that pond there home, so I’m conflicted with the idea of having them clean it up to allow it to look beautiful with the lillies blossomed and destroying the safe environment for the frogs to grow.

Inside the shop they also have many of the flowers they have in the garden as well as many others they haven’t planted out there for customers to view, and further in they have differen’t items such as garden ornaments, accessories, and some cute little dog treats. It’s a homey feeling place and the staff inside is always ready to help with any questions that you may have.

They also have an open field to the side that looks like they did grow something before, but I’m not sure if it was reserved for fruit trees, vegetables, various other plants, or if they had attempted to extend the garden but then haven’t had the time to do so in the recent years. Still if you’re looking to find some beautiful flowers and see a great example of how they would look in a garden setting, Sara’s Garden Center in Brockport is a greaet place to go.

How I Got Into Photography

How I got into phography…that is a very long and a very short story at the same time. If you want the short of it, it’s very
simple: I just really like going out and when I see something new and exciting I just take my camera out and take a photo. But obviously I haven’t had a camera my entire life.

To understand a bit about me from the beginning, or as close to what I want to be the beginning, I was a pretty high energy kid and that got me into a lot of trouble. By the time I was 6 years old, I had already gotten into enough trouble to get suspended from my first elemetary school with the potential to just be kicked out. Constant fighting, not listening to teachers, I bit a kid a couple times. Wasn’t all that great as a kid, but my mom didn’t try to stop me from being energetic and rambuncsious. Instead she decided I should join the Cub Scouts. Cub Scouts wasn’t really all that interesting though at a young age. Yeah we got to do some fun stuff like building pinewood derby cars, do some “Summer camp” stuff and go on a couple camping trips a year, but really it was all a gateway until I was old enough to join a Boy Scout troop and that’s where things started getting interesting.

Around 11 years old I had joined Boy Scout Troop 168 in Naples Florida. Every month we’d go camping somewhere not too far away and do things like learning the basics of survival, learning firearm safety, even got to learn more about conservation efforts around us and what we could do to help improve them. The camping is where I really started to see more than just the city I was born in and the parks around it. During the school year on our monthly camping trips we wouldn’t travel more than a couple hours away, but the world had already looked so different to me. There were forests and swamps I had never seen, animals I had never come across before, and people who spoke in different accents. It was exciting and new. During the summers that’s when things got really interesting. We would go places further away: Tennessee, Vermont, North Carolina. Hell, one year we even went to the International Jamboree in Edinborough Scotland. That trip alone is it’s own feature length film, though sadly I don’t have any photos from it. Those were the trips that really got me into going out and wanting to see the beauty of the world and do more than stay at home.

Now let’s fast forward many, many years. I’m 26 years old, I had been moved out of Florida for a couple years and have suffered the winters of New York. I had a good job and was given the opportunity to move out to Phoenix Arizona. I thought it was an awesome opportunity and jumped on it….totally not for finally getting away from snow, wasn’t a thought at all in my mind….
Anyway, before I left I had decided to buy a DJI Mavic Pro drone. That thing was fun to fly and with it started my journey with photography. I had tried to start making little videos and do photos of me on my motorcycle, but I had never really shared most of them and really always felt like they weren’t good. So my remaining time in New York wasn’t spent doing any real exploring with photography.

After I moved to Arizona things exploded. I was out every weekend driving for hours in the desert, hopping from city to city with my drone. The world was so different for me out there and I couldnt’ get enough of it. After a year of living in Arizona I finally decided to buy my first DSLR Camera, a Canon Rebel T7, for my birthday in February 2020 and it got to my door the first week of March 2020….right as the city shutdown for COVID. I wasn’t upset though as I always take time to learn how to use the new things that I get. So I spent days just watching YouTube videos from Peter McKinnon and Jared Polin on how to use cameras, how to really dial in settings while using Manual Mode, and my dog Odin became the perfect little model for photoshoots…..He’s an adorable pup, kinda hard to take bad photos of him.

As the months went on I was finally able to get out of my apartment and start going around the city to take photos. Even had some friends from the office I worked at before the shutdown do some modeling for me too as I gained skills and learned how to improve on my composition and ability to tell which settings I shoudl use. Then came what I consider some of the best experiences of photography for me, the night sky photography.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you this but it gets really, really dark out in the desert. You can’t tell what’s a foot infront of you dark. Which is perfect for summer night skies. When there’s no moon, no clouds, you can really make out the milky lines of stars and space dust that make up the “Milky Way” and Galactic Center. You can’t get them all the time, but when skies were perfect on a Wednesday night, you could bet I would be driving a couple hours out into the desert, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning, and then driving a couple hours home to then work at 7am without any sleep. Just the high I would get from the photos I was taking and seeing how beautiful the sky could really look was amazing. Always growing up in a city area you could never see that kind of stuff.

Fastforwarding a year and simplifying the rest of this story, I got my first paid gig when a friend asked me to take photos of his friend during a body building competition in Phoenix. Wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was enough to get me excited and deciding I needed a new camera to try out. Around that time the Canon R6 was a year or two old and I was able to get my hands on the body for a good price. With my new, more powerful camera in hand I took from what I could say were pretty awesome shots from my first attempt at competition photography.

Sadly, shortley after that I moved back to New York. From there though, I would take photos for other friends during their competitions, take photos for a local crossfit gym, start getting some wildlife photography in for fun, and even find a new place where the sky gets dark enough to see the Milky Way on the East Coast.

It’s been 6 years since I started with a drone and just wanting to have some fun. Now I’m confident in saying I have a good handle on how to take a good photo….the marketing aspect though….that’s a new journy to work on.