I met Judy Kay in an online class with The Define School almost two years ago. There were people from all over the world in that class and one other person from Travelers Rest. The odds of that happening are kinda crazy! We then realized that we had a few mutual friends, which was also a little crazy. I feel like our friendship was destined to happen, and it has. We both just took another class through The Define School together. It was fun to meet up with her and talk through our classes, and we might have cried a little together at how hard and good this particular class was. Our first class was taught by Molly Flanagan. Molly is wonderful, and amazing, and kind...we both learned so much through that class. The second class was with Zalmy Berkowitz. I can say all of the same things about Zalmy as I do for Molly, except Zalmy kicked both of our tails in ways that I think we are still learning about. I remember meeting at Tandem one morning and we both laughed and cried over the ridiculiousness of our own fears in this class and how Zalmy was pushing us away from those fears. The beginning of the school year I had put out a post about me wanting to shoot a homeschool session. I was hoping Judy Kay would say yes to that idea, and she did! I asked her if she would be okay with me shooting techiniques we had learned in our class with Zalmy. What that meant was I was going to shoot at f10-f14 inside! Judy Kay has amazing light in her house, but I knew it was still going to be a challenge. Shooting stopped down that much meant a lot of light would not be coming into my camera, so I would have to compensate by shooting with a really high ISO and then I would need to be careful to shoot more than 1/60th of a second. Basically what all of that means is this session was going to be hard and push me in a lot of new ways. The result of that would also mean lots of noisy photos even in really good light. Thankfully Judy Kay was okay with it and was really excited about it! I am so thankful for this sweet friendship that developed with The Define School. This friend allows me the room to try hard things and is okay with the end result. Thank you, friend! I appreciate you so very much!