This dandelion is incomplete.  Imperfect.  From a distance, I saw only a beautifully side-lit flower against a background in shadow — a radiant light in a dark room.  I was immediately drawn to it, and only when I got much closer did I notice that the top seeds of the flower had already blown off, leaving it something less than a perfect sphere.  My first instinct was to look around and see if I could find another specimen that had a still-complete sphere of a flower.  Only when I did not find another specimen did I take another look at this one and, upon looking more closely and seeing something more beautiful than a perfect sphere, decide to set up the tripod and create an image.  What did I see?

 

Higher than any visual aesthetic, the purpose of this flower is to be a launch platform for its seeds so that the plant may propagate.  The fact that some of the seeds had already launched is ample evidence that this flower was fulfilling its purpose and realizing its potential.  That is a beauty which transcends any degree of geometric precision in approximating a sphere, and that is the beauty I sought to capture with this image.  I now see this as a perfect dandelion.

 

One consequence of being a visual creature and being imprinted with the biases of advertising is that I have collected a vast array of visually perfect icons (one for almost every occasion), and have been implicitly trained to measure all “real world” visual samples against those perfect icons.  (In this case, I have an icon of a perfectly spherical dandelion in my mind — I don’t know how it got there, nor whether it is real or portrayed as real or just imagined — and the dandelion in this photograph did not closely match the idealized icon.)  This kind of training has channeled my thinking to perform a syntactic level of image comparison, rejecting as bad or imperfect the things which do not approach perfect matches to the idealized icons.