Difficult shoot this morning

I got up early to shoot in the morning light today. As the alarm began to bug me while it was still dark out, I considered canceling the shot I was planning this morning. I knew it would be difficult. It would be sad. But as I lay awake thinking how difficult and sad it would be, I realized I was already awake and may as well attack my task at hand.

The grave site is in the children's section of the cemetery. We'd all like to go through life pretending there isn't one of these sections in every cemetery, but there is. The tradition of embedding a photo on the stone has also come back in fashion, so there were little faces looking up from the ground all around me, many too young to yet open their eyes.

"He is the best thing that happened to me in my life. He was my world."

This shot is the best of the two I took. You can see I didn't get the slide all the way out (which hasn't happened to me yet), and the next shoot was enough minutes later that the light became brighter and harsher. Serendipity or perhaps the little boy's spirit itself created a rainbow lens-flare which I couldn't see in person. It was brighter in this shot, so this image is the one.