It was a fun and goofy photo project that started as a joke and yet, in a single moment, without my even doing anything, it morphed into something incredibly weighty, & hyper-meaningful - bordering on iconic. It also ended up turning a hobby into a career.

The year was 2000 and I had splurged about $3000 for the very first digital DSLR that Canon designed - the Canon D30. It was 3.1 Megapixel, 3 frame per second clunker with a max ISO of 1600 (you can see below how grainy it was) - but it was the cutting edge at the time.

The camera pretty much only worked in daylight and my wife, Celeste and I were Manhattanites with an infant so I talked her into holding up our new baby, Miles in different locations around the city. Former ballet dancers are not known for their arm strength and since Miles weighed 10 pounds at birth and was gaining fast it meant that I usually had about 4 seconds to get the shot. Miles also had a funny habit of opening his mouth and drooling all over everything so you really only had one shot anyway or his outfit would be wet. Good thing he was a cute little bald guy. Anyway…

The shot you see above was taken on September 4, 2001.

To be continued….