I fell in love with four photographs taken on my first roll of film. My grandfather had given me his Agfamatic camera, and I'd gone into the woods to take pictures. I had no idea what to do with a camera, but when I received the slides back, four of them delighted me. I had to take more, and I wanted to learn more. My guides were the Time/Life books in the university library and Freeman Patterson's book 'Photography for the Joy of It.' Those books taught me to see. Freeman Patterson has spent a life photographing and teaching people how to photograph. This year he celebrated his 75th birthday, and marking that he had an extensive 3 week tour of southern Ontario, giving design lectures, showing his work in a gallery show, celebrating at a special birthday gala, and running day long workshops. As I am beginning a new commitment to my photography, it seemed right I should take this chance to learn from him in person. I spent a day in his design workshop. I also signed up for a day long workshop where he presented in the morning, we shot for an hour after lunch, and then we spent the rest of the day talking about our photos. There were conditions for the shooting. Freeman had an exercise intended to encourage us to see. First, we had to shoot from a tripod to ensure that we were planning the shot, and then a little wrinkle: we couldn't move our tripod from where he put it down for us at the beginning of the exercise. Again, he was compelling us to see. Freeman picked up my tripod and carried it outside. He set it down beside a pressure treated board fence, on the edge of a parking lot in suburbia. He wanted us to see around us. There is a lot to see, he said, when you look. One wouldn't think there was a lot to shoot where he placed me. I would never have set up in that location. The first four images in this gallery are the ones I presented to the group for review, all taken in the parking lot. The rest of the photos are some more from the location, and some from the park nearby where I shot in the morning before the workshop began. I didn't really have the money for the workshop, and I wouldn't ever have shot photos in the parking lot, but taking the workshop gave me so much to work on, soul-work. That's the kind of teaching Freeman does. The camera, he says, looks both ways -out to the world and in to the photographer. And I wouldn't have had these photographs if I hadn't been in the parking lot and looked to what the world there gave me. Interesting that he asked us to pick four photos as it was four photos that started me on that photographic journey 39 years ago. Photography for me, thanks to Freeman, isn't about recording reality, isn't about cameras and f-stops essentially; photography is about what we are and what we see. Thank you Freeman. Happy Birthday!