When I first picked up a camera, I was a creature of the night. I chased the Milky Way and the aurora - a hobby lived in the sleeping hours. But you can't stay up every night, and all those daylight hours were sitting there empty, so I bought a Nikkor 105mm macro on a bit of a whim and went looking for something small to point it at. What I saw through the lens changed me. Flowers, trees, birds, bugs - ordinary nature I'd walked past a thousand times turned out to be a whole new universe up close. Lately I've been teaching myself to focus stack, blending frame after frame so every petal and stamen lands tack-sharp. I made this one over the weekend, on my knees pulling weeds around our pond. This water lily opened right in front of me and in the heat of the sun, it stopped me cold. She was glowing. I'll be honest: my days lately have been heavy ones, so a splash of color like this felt like more than a photograph. Water lilies root down in the dark mud at the bottom of the pond, rise up through the cold water, and open only when the light finally reaches them. They don't bloom in spite of the dark. They bloom because they came through it. That felt worth keeping. So I kept it.