I try not to go down the rabbit hole of pretty pictures, because there are the people with the mega lenses who ask each other, “say, chap, what’s the exposure on that?” I can’t compete, I don’ wanna compete, I can’t imagine walking around the bog with a lens the size of a small horse, trying to keep it dry, still, and think a lot about exposure values at the same time. I’d be down in the mud struggling like a fish on dry land desperately holding camera aloft and get nothing done.

Pretty flower and dew drop photography appeals to folks who like tech detail. That’s exactly why I didn’t go to grad school for pictures. I could just see getting caught among those who have long discussions of whether one should have used this lens or that, filled in with flash, and I might have to jump into that rocky chasm we just photographed for feeling both vastly bored and even more incompetent for being bored. So I became a historian instead (because historians don’t like detail?)

In any case, for the past two weeks, the dandelion fluff in my backyard has held me prisoner. And dandelion fluff is pretty much the prime pretty flower photography material. The innocents in my household are pulling their hair out, man and dog alike. “No, don’t mow/run through there, I am hoping it’ll blow/rain/be a great sunset/sunrise…” Of course then I miss it and another 3 days go by no mowing or enthusiastic galloping through the near field allowed. And when I think there could not possibly be more fluffy seed heads refracting light in my backyard there they are. And me on my belly among them, covered in fluff and ticks.

I am not the only one, there’s a vast dandelion fluff industry on Pinterest and sites like that. Dang! Given where I live, I must be among the last in the US who have the opportunity, so I can never get ahead of the competition. Fluff season has peaked by the time I get them up.

But you’re getting them anyway. We call them “horse flowers” in Holland, you know. The traditional image of a horse has it munching one. And of course dandelions, like horses, give it to you straight. Fluffy truth.

Love me, love me not.