A Different View

#189

#190

As I was outside cleaning off my back porch, I glanced up and noticed Milo gleefully racing through the backyard.  This struck me as kind of odd since it's 100 degrees outside.  But his happy mood made me happy and I decided to go walk through the yard with him.  I went to last year's pumpkin patch wondering if any volunteers had decided to pop up this year.  And that's when I saw it.  A beautiful little sunflower sharing it's glorious face with the world.  There's something about sunflowers that makes me instantly happy.  If you can manage to be in a bad mood around sunflowers then you might want to check into some therapy.  I'm not a doctor or anything, I'm just sayin'.

Since I love big yellow flowers (as you might've read here before!) I went inside to get my camera.  I started by taking pictures of the face of the flower because, well, because that's what I always do.  A nice little bee stopped by and posed for a few shots.  Or he collected some pollen, who knows.  And then I thought to myself, "I wonder why no one ever takes a picture of the back of the sunflower?"  I really couldn't think of a good reason not to photograph the back of the flower so I changed positions and proceeded to take a few more shots.  The lighting was different from the back as expected.  But what I hadn't notice at first was that the background was different.  It was a beautiful see of green... weeds.  Hey, the weeds are the only thing that ARE green right now thanks to a long, hot summer of no rain.  And they're a lot prettier than the see of dead grass that serves as the background for the first picture of the face of the flower.  So today I'm thankful for green weeds and for a few sunflowers that have managed to pop their heads up despite the drought.

It was a good reminder for me as a photographer that I should always look at my subject from all angles. Shifting my feet by a few degrees might give me an entirely different point of view that turns out to be better than what I thought in the first place.  The same is true in life.  Just had to throw that in there in case you were looking for a deeper metaphoric meaning.  Again, not a therapist, just sayin'.