Do you remember your first snow? Your first sight of a bird in a tree? Your first flash of lightning? Do you remember the world as viewed from your stroller, enormous and purely wonderful?
One afternoon last April, Ellen Roeser caught a glimpse of the world through the eyes of her 4-month-old grandson, Gerard Anthony Jude, as the pair of them took to the trails outside her home in Maple Grove.
“We are blessed to have such an abundance of beauty around us,” Roeser says, and this photograph, which won second place in the People and Families category of the 2014 Focus on Maple Grove contest, seems to suggest that the now-1-year-old Gerard shares his grandmother’s ardor for the natural locale they explore together on a near-daily basis. Though he can’t yet put it into words, Gerard’s expression says it all. His wide eyes, like the surface of a still lake, capture the reflection of the clouds in the sky, a border of tree branches, and the silhouette of his adoring caretaker, camera in hand.
“It’s not so much my photography that makes it special,” Roeser says. The hobbyist suggests that her photography skills have improved greatly since “the perfect subject” was born. Indeed, this is already the second time the young muse has appeared in a contest-winning shot.
