Quiet Wonder Photography

Quiet Wonder Photography Fine Art/Independent Nature Photographer

Capturing Beauty Most People Walk Past

Some award-winning blooms at the Darke County Fair displayed inside the fairgrounds Coliseum ❤️🌸🌱There were some display...
08/25/2026

Some award-winning blooms at the Darke County Fair displayed inside the fairgrounds Coliseum ❤️🌸🌱

There were some displays with lights behind them and it made for a very cool bokeh background 😍

Owning the sunflower field misfits that didn't sell. 🌻There's so much freedom in refusing to pretend to be perfect.I'm n...
08/20/2026

Owning the sunflower field misfits that didn't sell. 🌻

There's so much freedom in refusing to pretend to be perfect.
I'm not a content creator. I don't know how to make everything cute, cohesive and perfectly digestible so that someone scrolling by stops and thinks, Oooh, I need that.

I take pictures.

Then I print them, frame them, wrestle with glare, rearrange them 25 times and try to figure out a systematic way to show what I have without making myself crazy.

I also work with babies and toddlers four days a week. My one weekday off is for cleaning, errands, cooking (maybe 😂) and whatever creativity I can squeeze into it.

I've gone through my inventory and tossed photographs that didn't make the cut. Some looked beautiful on a screen but pixelated when printed. Some were over-edited. Some just weren't something I'd be excited to package up and send to someone.
Some frames got tossed too, because scratched plexiglass? Absolutely not.

And yes, I brought home every single one of my sunflower field photographs that didn't sell.
They're officially my little sunflower misfits. 🌻
They came home with a little barn dirt on them. Some of the frames had tape stuck to the sides from tags that were added while they were displayed. They're a little less pristine than when I dropped them off, but they were sent off into the world and had an adventure ❤️
I'm also not embarrassed by them. I'm not embarrassed that I tried something and it didn't work the way I hoped.
That's part of creating something from scratch. Sometimes you have an idea you're excited about, put it out into the world...and bring all of of them back home. 😂
I'm actually proud that I'm learning to look at what I've created and say:
This stays.
This goes.
This needs work.
And this is really freaking beautiful.
I'm learning what photographs print well. What frames I actually like. What isn't worth buying again. What works for displaying them and what absolutely does not. I'm slowly creating a system that works for me instead of constantly trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing.
Quiet Wonder Photography isn't polished perfection.
It's me learning. Creating. Trying things. Scrapping things. Getting better. And noticing beautiful things most people walk right past.
No perfectly curated content calendar. No pretending every idea is a success. No hiding the misfits.
Just me, my camera, a bunch of frames, entirely too much glare, and a genuine love for making beautiful things.
And I think I'm finally okay with letting that be enough.

So here's my sweet sunflower children that didn't stray too far from home 😂😊

🌻 Sunflower Field Misfits — $30 each, originally $45.

These were displayed at the Suns Flower sunflower field and came home with a little character—minor wear/dirt/tape residue on some frames. The photographs themselves are beautiful, but I don't feel right selling the frames as brand new ❤️

(There are a few duplicates ❤️)

Nature has a funny way of being both perfectly designed and wonderfully strange.The symmetry of a wing.A tiny cluster of...
08/13/2026

Nature has a funny way of being both perfectly designed and wonderfully strange.

The symmetry of a wing.
A tiny cluster of mushrooms rising from the mulch.
Hundreds of seeds arranged in a pattern.
Delicate threads radiating from a center point.

Up close, even the oddities have order.

Maybe that's part of what keeps me looking—the realization that beauty doesn't always arrive as a sunset or a perfect flower. Sometimes it's strange. Sometimes it's tiny. Sometimes you have to get ridiculously close to appreciate just how intricate it actually is.

There is art in the unusual, too!

Caught this little cutie after it downpoured and stormed all day. Felt nice to to see the sun again 🩷
08/12/2026

Caught this little cutie after it downpoured and stormed all day. Felt nice to to see the sun again 🩷

It's ironic. I used to be so intimidated by my Canon that I would rarely use it. I loved the idea of having it, but felt...
08/12/2026

It's ironic.

I used to be so intimidated by my Canon that I would rarely use it. I loved the idea of having it, but felt like I wasn't smart enough to operate it. (It has nothing to do with how intelligent you are, you just have to decide to learn or not).

Now I don't like how my smartphone pics look 🤣

Flowers are one of my favorite thing to photograph, but despite the fact that they stand still, their bright colors can be so harsh when using a smartphone, that they can look muddled and nothing like they do in person!

I am not knocking smartphone pics because I relied heavily on mine for a good 6 years for a lot of my nature and macro photography.

I'm telling you (and myself lol) that it makes a world of difference just learning a few of the basics!

The right picture has not been edited at all! Once I taught myself and finally understood how to troubleshoot in harsh or ever changing outdoor lighting, I can get much better pictures!

Is it award-winning? Probably not, but it's crazy the difference I see now.

If you prefer not to see posts about someone learning and showing their good moments as well as tons of their mistakes, flowers, snowflakes and their supportive family, unfollow now 😆

On the surface, people see that I take photos.But it really isn't about photography.There was a time when I second-guess...
08/11/2026

On the surface, people see that I take photos.

But it really isn't about photography.

There was a time when I second-guessed everything about myself. I worried about being misunderstood, over-explained myself, and somehow made the way other people treated me a reflection of my own worth.

I've learned that people are allowed to misunderstand me. They're allowed to not support me, not care about what I care about, or have a version of me in their head that I don't recognize.

I know who I am. I know how I love people. I know what I bring to the table. I also know when I'm wrong, and I'm perfectly capable of owning that.

But one of the biggest parts of finding that confidence has been my husband.

He has never once made me feel stupid for loving photography as much as I do.

He doesn't roll his eyes when I want to stop for a picture. He doesn't make me feel guilty for spending hours editing, learning my camera, chasing bees around the yard or getting excited over light hitting a flower just right.

He supports it because he knows it matters to me.

There is something incredibly healing about being loved by someone who doesn't make you smaller.

Someone who doesn't tolerate your joy, but genuinely wants you to have more of it.

Kreg has healed parts of my heart he didn't break simply by loving me without making me earn the right to be myself.

And somewhere in all of that, I learned to trust myself again.

I appreciate the people who genuinely support me more than I can say.

And I've finally made peace with the fact that not everyone will.

I don't need everyone to understand me anymore.

The people who truly know me do.

And most importantly, so do I.

This morning I spent a few hours doing nothing but practicing with my DSLR.I'm pretty sure my neighbors think I've offic...
08/06/2026

This morning I spent a few hours doing nothing but practicing with my DSLR.

I'm pretty sure my neighbors think I've officially lost it. 😂 I'd walk outside, take a photo, look at it, mutter to myself, change a setting, take another, walk back inside... then do it all over again.

But today I made a decision:

I'm going to learn this camera.

I used to bring it along on hikes and outings, hoping it would magically create the photos of the scenery right in front of me. When they didn't turn out the way I imagined, I figured maybe it just wasn't working for me.

It wasn't the camera. It was the operator.

So instead of wishing I knew what all the buttons did, I'm learning them. One setting at a time. One blurry photo at a time. One little breakthrough at a time.

There's something really satisfying about realizing the problem isn't a dead end—it's simply a skill you haven't learned yet.

Today's breakthrough was **Aperture (AV mode)**.

📷 Aperture is simply how big or small the opening inside your lens is.

• **Smaller f-number (f/2.8, f/4)** = Bigger opening = More light.
• **Bigger f-number (f/8, f/11)** = Smaller opening = Less light.

For some reason, that took my brain forever to understand. 😂

I'm still very much a beginner with this DSLR, but I'm committed to understanding it instead of being intimidated by it.

So if you see me wandering around my yard talking to flowers and chasing bumblebees with a camera... don't worry.

I'm just learning. 🌼🐝

These are straight out of the camera after adjusting Aperture and ISO as needed or before each shot; no editing.

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Troy, OH

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