In 2012, I moved into town, a lowly, humble lake of 20,000 not too far from my birth city. We had recently moved out of my even smaller home town of 2,000 because my father, a retired member of the USAF, found work here as a truck driver. While looking for a house to live in, we accommodated a small condominium suite that was by the interstate and lakeside. It had three other suites that shared the same "backyard" with a dock at the end to launch jet skis and go swimming from.

Being much younger at the time, I wasn't able to go out much, so I found myself at home a lot after school, enjoying the lake view since I grew up surrounded by lakes and going swimming a lot. Around that time I was looking for a hobby, something that I could click with, to sort of pass the time. I made many big decisions around this time of my life, such as my main hobbies, my career and university choices, and most notably, I settled on my fursona's design, transforming myself into the loving fluffy dragon I am today.

One of the hobbies that I chose was photography. I knew that I wasn't the greatest at drawing, that writing was beginning to get a little boring at the time, and music production wasn't my thing. I couldn't go golfing much since my father had to drive me and he was on the road a lot, and we didn't have the room to move our piano into the suite, so I couldn't play yet. However, I knew that we had a camera, a humble Fujifilm point-and-shoot unit that we brought with us on vacations, that I was familiar with using. I decided to take it one evening and go out to the dock and snap my first ever photo of the lake. It was a panorama, this one.

At the time, I didn't really understand how to properly operate any camera or have a "photography mentality", I just had the eye for it, and what was at the time my trusty unit. I had no editing skills, no Adobe software, no anything, just the single lens on this one cheap $50 camera. It was a low quality image by a lot of standards, but I loved it. Something about it just.. clicked with me. So the next day I did it again. And again. I continued doing this until I had many variations of this one single lake scene, which was my only big canvas, since I was stuck at home pretty much always. I took photos of other things, but the lake was what I felt myself always going back to as my subject. It posed for me, asking me to take photos of it when the sun was high, when it was low in the sky, shining through the clouds after the rain, and absent in the midst of the winter storms we got every year.

For years and years, that lake was mine. I woke up to it and saw it every morning, wished it well, and came back to it every evening, keeping it company and giving it the attention no one else in the condo would. I grew up to become who I am by that lake. I have taken hundreds of photos of this lake, though few I've kept, and a handful uploaded to my DeviantArt account that I opened up to give my photography hobby more purpose. Nothing brought me more joy at the time than going down to that dock and sitting, waiting for the right moment, and keeping that night with me not in .CR2, but in .JPEG.

In late December of that year, 2014, I took a photo to show off my little dock and the beautiful, beautiful sky that we got quite often in the pretty-but-dreary fall-to-winter weather. This one.

This photo is, to this day, still my favorite that I've ever taken. I don't have a better photo that's captured the serenity of that dock, that lake, nor any other of my vantage points from there or the hill I live on now. This photo was my first print and first entry to the local photography contest that comes with the county fair every year. This print was showcased in the halls of my high school and the one I'd show people whenever they asked me to see some of the photos I've taken. It's by no means a high quality photo, not compared to some of the newer photos I've taken, which number in the thousands, but no scene has yet to touch me like this one has.

With that said, my five year "anniversary" so to speak of starting what has been one of my biggest hobbies has arrived, and I wanted to commemorate it with an art piece. Five years of seeing the world through a camera lens, five years of learning to appreciate the things we see on a daily basis more than we normally would appreciate them, five years of going out of my way to drive and travel far from home to just... see things, no camera required, just to marvel at the beauty that is nature and the sky.
I wanted to have one of my best photos redrawn to commemorate this, and went through many of them. Despite the handfuls of newer photos I have that are better in almost every way objectively, I still found myself falling back to this one. This single photo that represents me growing into the person I am now, the years spent at that lake figuring myself out, the colors and scenery that I adore the most... the five years of photography I've created for myself. This is the "me" photo of my time. This is my photo.

I went through many artists and came to one on DeviantArt who offered some awesome sketch commission types. I knew I needed this piece to be a sketch type, because even in sketch type art pieces lie some incredible beauty and display of artistic skill. Even in the lowest tier can you find the most meaning, most personality, and that was what I wanted to do, because I know that despite this photo being taken on the lowest quality of cameras, on the lowest quality extension, with no photography understanding or knowledge and being completely unfiltered and unedited, it remains one of my best ones. This sort of statement is where I find beauty in art and many other things that I never thought I'd find before. It's the mentality growing up that I used to find appreciation in things I hadn't considered even thinking of before. It's why I found this one lake to be worthy of so many photos, always posing for me, and smiling at me through the curtains of clouds that would dance around every evening.

I reached out to turnipBerry to do this drawing for me, and I was blown away by the quality. Five years of photography in the making, all captured and reimagined in this photo that I define myself with. All of those years, the journeys I've had and moments I've kept to myself, loving, feeling, thinking, and creating, all in this one sketchy drawing.
I've moved out from that property since, but there isn't a thing I wouldn't give to revisit and have a night to myself on the dock like I used to one last time.
I never got to properly bid that lake farewell, since there was some work being done on the yard the week we moved out, and I couldn't stay any longer to wait for it to finish, but I knew that I wouldn't need to bid it farewell. It's always with me in my heart, and this drawing has done that night the justice that my camera then could not capture.

Thank you, lake, for bringing me one of the greatest lessons in my life and keeping me company through all of those lonely months.

Thank you, turnipBerry, for beautifully redrawing this photo into one of the most meaningful pieces of art in my life. I couldn't have chosen a better artist for something like this. It may be small to many, but this commemoration means so much to me that I couldn't describe it in enough words. My words are all gone, anyway, after seeing this amazing drawing, I'm simply at a loss.

And thank you, reader, for taking the time to read this story and hopefully understand why this drawing has so much meaning to me and why I love it so much. I couldn't have asked for a better commemoration of my five years of photography.

Silver belongs to me, and the artwork belongs to turnipBerry.

Special thanks to Mrs. Robertson and the photography club, for helping me realize why I was meant for this hobby.


I hope you have a great day today, reader.