Trent, over at Trent’s World urges us all to post one smile a week, because we could all use a smile now and then. I’m been absent these past few weeks, not because anything terrible has happened, or because I couldn’t think of any smiles. No, I haven’t posted a smile in awhile because I’ve been so darn busy, or out of town, or forgetful.

Maybe all of the above.

But this week I can’t but help sharing a smile. Specifically a very sweet, heavily perfumed smile. The kind of wide smile that happens when you see fields and fields of lavender in bloom.

Which is exactly what happened to me.

I signed up weeks ago, long before our D.C. trip, even before the Norway adventure, for an evening photo shoot in a lavender farm located about an hour away from me.

Then I forgot all about it.

Good thing I put it on the calendar in ink, just to remind me, otherwise I’d have missed this heavenly opportunity altogether. And that would have been a shame, because I couldn’t stop grinning the whole evening.

Imagine.

A small group of photographers and a whole lot of lavender, lining up in rows, topping hills, glowing in the sun.

Alive with bees and butterflies, the purple heads nodding in the breeze or reaching for the sky.

Rows and rows and rows of lavender.

And a few other photo worthy things as well. Some of them were placed there by the lavender farm itself, as points of interest for photographers.

Some of them were just growing wild along the edges of the fields.

All of it was just wonderful.

There was so much to see, let me insert a little slide show here.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As the sun went down we were reluctant to leave. But we had our lavender shots and all that was left was to capture the sunset. So we did.

I can’t fully explain what a treat this was, and I thank Bob Ditommaso, a professional photographer who teaches great classes, for putting these opportunities out there for us.

It was a fun evening, I met some great people and I finally figured out how to capture images totally in the manual mode on my new camera. That’s been so frustrating for me and I was grateful for the “aha!!!” moment I had out there in the lavender.

If you want to understand your camera better, and you’re in the Detroit area, take a class from Bob, and then join him and some other great students for one of his meetups.

Guaranteed to be phenomenal.