One of the reasons I love photography, is that I can’t paint or draw.

But many times, it’s much more than that.  Sometimes, I go outside with my camera and inadvertently discover something.

Take this flower, for example. It’s a flower. It’s yellow. The rest of the plant is in serious need of being deadheaded. But, as far you know, this yellow flower is a sample of the beauty of my yard.

(unless you are my neighbor and you recognize it for the anomaly that it is!)

But then,  I take my macro lens and I zoom in. And because there was just the hint of a shake. And because my aperature wasn’t closed down quite enough, I got this.

The overall effect is yellow and good enough. But mostly, we’ve lost sight of what it is.

I tried again, backing off a little and make some other kind of adjustment. It had just rained here, so I was trying to move in and catch the raindrop.

I did. But I also caught the ugly and dying tips of the flowers that weren’t visible in that first picture above. And the tail end of a bug can be seen, too.

I can see the beautiful water drop. But what did it cost me?

I see it a lot today. We are so starved for beauty, we want it to be pure and crisp and clean. So we move in close.

We move in too close. We move in so close that we have lost sight of what the original image was. The flower was beautiful. There was beauty to be had and studied.

Move in close and the ugliness of dirt and decay spoil it for us.

We don’t need to do that all the time.

It’s okay to approach beauty and gaze on it. It’s okay to not dissect it and find the sin that wounded it.

 

 

 

It’s enough to know that flowers don’t last forever, and that it’s fall, and the flower is probably fading.

Gaze on the beauty where you find it.