of course you’re pretty, honey

this is the podium at the finals of the ‘miss grapevine beetle larva’ pageant of 2017. it was a strong year, full of beautiful young women. but these three just had a little something extra special.

grubs

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

thataway

i seem to have lost my youth, i told the timothy grass. have you seen it? can you point the way?

tall prairie grass (either creeping foxtail or timothy)

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

a focal point

sometimes it’s tricky, when i take 80 or 100 photos of the same arrangement, to decide which one to keep. a lot of times it’s almost arbitrary. but sometimes the winner announces itself because it has a focal point. there is beauty and interest and a nice composition and good color and all that, but there is something else that draws your eye. some spot inside the image that asks you to pay attention to it, and sort of organizes everything else around it. in this case, it was the little dark hollow in the upper third of the image. there are a few fern fronds that point into it, and it is darker than the rest, and it makes you wonder what else is going on down there, and it makes the lighter green ferns around it look sunlit. it’s the thing i look at first, before i move on to all the rest.

understory

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

as fresh as a . . . wait

it really comes down to magnification, doesn’t it? from a distance this looks like a dewy, emerging daisy. from up close it’s clearly a black eyed susan, and just about as hairy as a bear.

wild yellow daisy

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

youth

this turned into an unintentional portrait of my daughter. young, beautiful, bursting with life, about to display her mature gifts to the world. slightly prickly.

musk thistle bloom

minneapolis, minnesota