My mother loved taking pictures.  Thanks to her I have a wonderful pictorial timeline of my life growing up.  It is interesting to watch the evolution of people in photography — from those first formal black and white portraits with families posing stiffly to the more casual color photos we see today.  Thanks to my iPhone, I always have my camera with me, and I am able to capture completely candid moments like this.  We were waiting at the dentist’s office and my little girl struck up a conversation with another little girl near her age in the artless way that children do.  I listened to them talk for awhile, comparing where they were in school to the number of teeth they’d lost.  I glanced up at one point and saw this.  Both little girls were examining an almost life sized bronze of a little girl about their age who was reading a book.  Something about it struck me, and I was able to get the shot before the minute passed.  Life is made up of moments big and small.  In the past it was important to have the big ones photographed for posterity.  Now we have the luxury of photographing the little ones, and they can be just as meaningful.  Unlike a painting, subject to the interpretation of the artist, the lens does not lie.  The American photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange once said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  She was best known for her work which humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.  Although my degree is in journalism I consider myself a photojournalist as well, following in the footsteps of my mother as both a writer and a photographer.  Life will not always be perfect or go the way we’d planned.  How we choose to view the blessings we have been given in this life, however, can always make it picture perfect.