File_load for image path errors when empty
Found the answer here: http://www.drupalden.co.uk/rendering-drupal-7-fields-custom-node.tpl.php-templates 

&lt;?php
// field_my_image is the name of the image field

  // using field_get_items() you can get the field values (respecting multilingual setup)
  $field_my_image = field_get_items('node', $node, 'field_my_image');

  // after you have the values, you can get the image URL (you can use foreach here)
  $my_image_url = file_create_url($field_my_image[0]['uri']);

  print $my_image_url;
?&gt;