Anabelle won 2nd place for her photography!

Anabelle came home a few weeks after school had started and said she wanted to participate in the Reflections contest at school. Reflections encourages children to use different art forms to express themselves. Each year they choose a theme and the children can choose to express it through visual arts, photography, or music. Honestly, I wasn't thrilled with the idea because we had SO much going on, but how could I say no? She had made up her mind that she wanted to enter in the photography portion because she thought it was the easiest. She quickly learned that it wasn't just as simple as taking a photo. She also had to think of a title and describe how her photo showed beauty. This required some thinking!!

One nice afternoon, we went outside and I told her to take some pictures of things she found beautiful in our backyard. I told her that beauty is all around her. You don't have to drive far to find it :0). She took some great shots of flowers around our house & the lake. She also took one of a knot in a tree that was in the shape of a heart. I showed her how she can move her body & the camera in different ways to look at one object from different perspectives. After many photos, we went inside and looked at them on the computer. She narrowed her favorites down to three:

After really thinking about it, she chose the red rose (which was my favorite as well). A few days later, she had to come up with a title and a reason why it showed beauty. This was the hard part!!! She ultimately decided on the title being, 'Rose of September' and she said it showed beauty because "The color just popped out and I couldn't take my eyes off of it."

Last weekend we got a call that she won 2nd place! We went to the awards ceremony last night and we were all very proud of her. After they called her name she said, "I had butterflies in my stomach!"

Here's the video:

Here's Anabelle with her photo and her proud Dad.