One summer morning Miley decided she wanted to go outside and take some photographs.  She really likes using Brooke’s camera best so she asked Brooke if she could borrow it.  Brooke said she could but told her to be sure to choose good subjects and don’t just take a bunch of random pictures.  On several occasions, Miley has been known to fill up the memory card, then when Brooke goes to use her camera, she can’t until she transfers the photos.  She promised she wouldn’t fill it up again.

I was in the kitchen doing dishes. As Miley ran towards the door, she told me she was going to go take some pictures and was hoping to get a couple good ones to enter in the county fair. At the previous county fair, the majority of the photos she took were of flowers. The judge told her she was great at photographing flowers, but would like to see her expand into other subjects. I stopped her and reminded her to make sure she finds a variety of interesting subjects to photograph.  She promised she would.

A couple weeks later, Miley was at 4H camp and Brooke had a day off from work.  She woke up early that day so she could go out and take photos when the light from the sun was just right.  I was in the kitchen doing dishes, as usual, as Brooke went outside.

A few minutes later she came in very frustrated and said, “Mom, she did it again!”

“What did she do?”

“She took a bunch of pictures and filled up the memory card again!  It’s so full that it won’t let me view the pictures on the camera!” She grabbed her laptop and made a folder labeled “Miley’s photos” and began transferring them. 

As they started to appear in the folder one by one, Brooke said, “Oh my gosh Mom, she filled my memory card up with a bunch of random dandelion pictures!”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it, and walked over to see. Sure enough, random pictures of a dandelion were popping up into the folder one by one. Still laughing I said, “Leave it to Miley to do a photo shoot of a dandelion!” As I stood there watching, it took me back to a time when she was around 3 years old…

It was a warm spring day and we had just gotten home from shopping. As we got out of the car, Miley said, “Mom, look at all of those flowers!” as she pointed to our yard.  I looked up and our yard was filled with dandelions.  I said, “Yeah, we should have treated our yard with something so we wouldn’t have so many.”  She got a confused look and asked, “Why?” I told her that all those flowers were dandelions, which are weeds, and would eventually continue to take over our yard if we didn’t treat it. She looked at me and in a very serious voice she said, “Those are beautiful flowers, not weeds.”  I glanced out over our yard and paused.  The bright yellow flowers sprinkled through out our yard did add color to it…   Then my mind started filling with memories of her happily running around the yard carefully picking a bouquet for me, and another to put in a small jelly jar to decorate the kitchen table. Occasionally she’d pause to pick one that went to seed, blow the fluff and giggle as it floated away. 

My thoughts were interrupted when Brooke said, “You know what makes this even worse?  My camera was set to RAW, so all these dandelion photos are huge files and are taking up a lot of space on my computer!”  Again, I laughed, I couldn’t help it.

Once all the pictures were loaded onto the computer, we started looking through them…

Below is only a fraction of the photos she took. Click pictures to enlarge.

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There was the dandelion in the mud.. then it was among the weeds… then it was in the bird bath… Brooke was still a little frustrated, “Dandelions… really? A few dandelion pictures would have been fine… but an entire memory card full?”

The frustration turned to giggles and soon the giggles turned into laughter. We came across the pictures of the dandelion floating in the stock tank and Brooke noticed how she caught the reflection of the sky, a cloud and a tree branch. “You know, she really did use creativity and I do have to admit that so far a lot of these pictures are really good.” I agreed.

When we came to the photo of her hand holding the dandelion, I paused. Her hand gently holding the dandelion up high, proudly against the blue sky and green trees… the bright shade of yellow is like happiness and sunshine, laughter and fun…. It was so beautiful and made us smile!

The county fair came and Miley entered several of her favorites. She was so happy to see that the judges liked her photos…

As long as you have a passion for something and follow your heart, the beauty, love and inspiration will always show through. Dandelions can be a perfect subject for a photo because after all, they are very beautiful flowers.