I have a hard time deciding what my favorite picture that I have taken is. For a long time I pointed people to a picture of my daughter Ella in which she is looking off into the distance (she is probably 3 or 4 years old in it), and I just think it captures her demeanor so perfectly that it makes me proud to have taken it. The thing is, I don’t know if that is actually my favorite image, it just became the one that I said was. Does that make any sense? It is a hard sensation to describe. But it became comfortable to just have a dedicated favorite image and not have to put any thought towards it anymore.

A strange thing about taking pictures all the time is you never really set out with the mindset “I’m going to take my favorite picture today”. I rarely ever even leave my front door thinking that I will get anything good at all, I just want to go out and hear the shutter make noise and fall into that familiar fugue. I really try to not even look at what I have captured on the back of my camera while I am out and about; instead I try and save the “reveal” for when I am back at home and I can look through them on my computer.

But I guess just by the law of large numbers, a favorite picture has to happen at some point. I think that is what happened here, simple statistics. I know this isn’t the most technically perfect picture I have ever taken, or the most stunning, or the most intriguing; it isn’t even the most beautiful. But it just draws me in a way that no others do. On my backup hard drive, I just hit 90,000 pictures and I have stopped looking to try and find my favorite. This one snuck up on me, and I love it. But I don’t think that I will label it as my favorite in my head, because I want my next favorite to sneak up on me just like this one did.

This is a group of flowers from a Field Rose by my mailbox. It is one of a pair of 15 foot tall bushes that smell like heaven and remind me of the joys of summer. The buds look just like miniature rose buds, and the brand new blooms are an incredibly delicate pink with extremely vibrant yellow stamens and pistil. After about a day of being open, the flowers turn ivory white and their reproductive parts mature to a warm brown. It is just a ditch plant that happened to grow there, but I am finding that all of my favorite plants here seem to be that way. Nature is the best landscaper.