By Jason McCarthy
It was February 23, 2013 and good photographers are expensive when your company is young and you’re broke. I didn’t know how to take a good picture, but I went by my same philosophy on knot tying: if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.
So I’d take whatever new gear, in this case “brown” rucks, and Java and I would go find a spot outside to take the thousands of pictures I’d need to whittle down to a few usable ones. As with most artistic or really all endeavors for that matter, it’s tedious work, short on fanfare and mostly done in isolation. Java became the respite for the isolation part anyway, and what I quickly found was that a picture of a ruck is a lot more interesting with Java in it than just a ruck.
We drove up the road to Fernandina Beach, Florida with Java and the “brown” rucks and waited for the softer light to roll in (testing my patience, of course), and I probably could have just taken most of these in someone’s front yard, but then there wouldn’t have been the story or the visiting of the first bar in Florida or the local shrimp and grits from the shrimp shack or the live music we stumbled onto just off the main drag.
Adventures come in all shapes and sizes, at all distances from your home.
Once we were back home at the Team House, as I was editing all the pictures down, GR1 Brown just wasn’t quite working for me but what should we call it?
And then it hit me … wait for it … we’ll call them “Java”. And so as I miss that dog every day, it always brings a smile to my face when we bring his color back. And here it is.
Check out the entire Java Collection. Available for GR0, GR1, and GR2.
