Annette Nelson is a third generation Arizonan. Slack Motors in downtown Glendale was her family’s business while she was growing up. She has been married to Jim Nelson for 35 years and they have one son.

They were married in Arizona but then moved to Wisconsin in 2003, where Jim is from, and they lived there for 15 years. They had a garden and grew their own food in the summer. In the winter, ice hockey kept them busy; Annette played in a women’s league while Jim coached, sometimes the same team. They have only been back in Arizona for the last six years.

Though she has been taking pictures with her phone over the years, and still does because the phones are so good, Nelson considers herself new to photography. She has been following her husband around telling him what she wants him to shoot for many years, and only recently finds herself looking through the viewfinder.

Nelson bought her husband a new camera for Christmas of 2022 and inherited his Canon D60 and started to learn how to take pictures with it. They take road trips/day trips to see what pictures await them. Their list of places to explore and photograph is growing faster than they can check them off.

While Nelson enjoys looking out at large landscapes and shoots her fair share of them, she has found her passion lies with macrophotography, shooting smaller subjects and making them bigger than life. Her subject of choice is flowers, and the smaller the better. When choosing what to process Nelson is drawn to the smaller subjects. Her husband knows that when he can’t find her while they are out exploring and shooting he needs to look down because he will likely find her lying on the ground or kneeling down trying to take pictures of the smallest flowers she can find.

Nelson says sometimes those small flowers are a challenge to find, but she almost always finds them no matter the time of year or the landscape. She adds that if someone has an interest, they should follow that interest — “You will be amazed at what you might find.”