As a photographer I am always looking for the next photo op, the next chance to take a "keeper". When I walked downtown Saturday to shoot the Butter and Eggs parade, I knew there would be more photos waiting for me than I had room to save on my flash card.

The easy part of photographing something as festive and colorful as the B n E parade is shooting the obvious pictures; floats, smiling, young girls dressed as chicks or fancy cars. The challenging part is finding the pictures no one (or almost no one) else will think to take. More than anything else, I wanted to find interesting subjects that said "only in Petaluma".

The small, white patch created by departing dandelion seeds grew considerably from one day to the next. In all my years of gardening I never stopped to look so closely at a dandelion as I did last week. When I examine the spot where each seed connects to the rest of the flower, I am amazed at how delicately the two are connected and yet the seeds remained in place through the falling rain.

Seeds barely connected to the home base, carrying with them the means of transportation to a new location, ready to begin the next generation once they land. One small but amazing way in which nature quietly displays its elegant powers of design. And a dandy demonstration of the wonders that await us when we take the time to look closely in the garden.

If you look closely at the first dandelion photos I posted you will see tiny drops of water on the stalks and at the ends of the seeds. While the "upside down umbrella" end of a seed had water on it, its tips were folded up. It looked like an umbrella with its spine blown up by a strong wind. Once the tips dried out, the umbrella ends of the seeds spread open and assumed the typical fuzz ball appearance.

The dandelion seed is composed of three parts. The seed head is connected to a short, thin stalk which is connected to the piece that makes it possible for the dandelion seed to float away, the piece I called the upside down umbrella end. Does anyone know the real name of the umbrella?

How does your garden grow?

With lots of people and even more beer I think!

Here's the situation: you want people to have a good time but you don't want them getting drunk and then rowdy. This may not be a problem worthy of Solomon but one the parade planners or City or whoever is in charge of such matters needed to address. The solution? Create beer gardens. Put up a fence, put down a lawn and corral as many beer drinkers into the pen as you can. Then watch the proceeds roll in. I don't know if you could buy wine in the gardens but if you could, it hardly seems fair to only call it a beer garden. Why not beer and wine?

I'm not certain why those in charge believed beer gardens, whatever they serve, would persuade the rowdy among us to participate in a kind and gentle fashion.

Perhaps the thinking was that if you could keep all the alcohol consumers in one place, they would drink responsibly. Or maybe the garden fence has amazing powers to detoxify those who have one too many.

Or maybe I should have had a few beers instead of taking pictures!

I wonder why I don't see more pictures where the photographer has zoomed in for a closer look. With today's digital cameras, getting a good close up is as easy as turning a dial to the macro setting and moving in on a subject. Getting up close and personal may not the best way to approach a stranger but it can make for very interesting photographs. A shot of a dandelion taken from a few feet away will more than likely produce a very forgettable picture. But a shot of a dandelion taken from a few inches away can be just the opposite, introducing viewers to dandy details they've never seen before.

In case you are wondering, I PhotoShop-ed the first picture.

I love the rain. Yesterday's rain could very well be the last we'll see in these parts until next fall. It was a wonderful, season-ending wet kiss from the weather gods.

After the last drops stopped falling, I ventured out to my backyard. Camera in hand, I wandered into a gray world of muted colors and sparkling jewels sprinkled everywhere. Every green leaf, every seed head and every flower was covered with tiny spheres of water. Transparent pearls covered every surface strong enough to bear the weight of the drops. Droplet mirrors, reflecting the world around them, transformed a grayblah morning into a photographer's delight.

Of all the dandelions I have ever looked in the eye, I have never looked so closely at any of them as I did this one. It was almost as if the puffball asked me to take its picture! How could I say no? From a typical distance the white spot on the dandelion reminded me of a bald spot on a man's head. From up close, my what a difference!