camera – where we will grow

This is Caleb. His super powers include taking great photos and being surprisingly effervescent. His weakness? Being way too easily distracted by beautiful things. But that helps with the photography aspect of life… So it’s not such a bad weakness to have.

It is uncommon to find people who really see the world, who actually see others. How many times a day is the old Admin building passed, glanced at, overlooked? How many times a day do individuals look at one another and fail to truly see anything worthwhile? The best artists show the world what they see, and Caleb sees a lot. I have an assumption that his camera can never keep up.

I’ve had a few shots of him for several weeks from a brief adventure we took to welcome the new year. They’ve been used to practice sketching buildings and stairwells. Usually I dislike drawing anything that can’t answer back. So… when is comes to architecture I doodle and break every shading law in existence because I prefer to scribble without thought.

But a couple sketches, while lacking in plenty of ways, turned out to be at least interesting. So here’s to many moments of sketching in coffee shops without diligence and sneaking a sharpie out of my backpack in class from time to time. A line at five, a shadow at ten. It’s not much, but it adds up to plenty of scribbles which I’m going to go ahead and call art.

Melissa Dow: teacher, reader, occasional rapper and Bohemian Rhapsody singer. The two of us embarked on our photo-shoot adventure on a surprisingly warm day for our little Northwestern town. I could tangent off into cliche observations of the brilliant dappled leaves (They really were beautiful) but I won’t. Instead I will make an observation about the lady making funny faces in the majestic autumn leaves. Put simply, Melissa Dow is hilarious. My camera could hardly keep up with her spontaneity. She read to me in Latin, rolled various accents off her tongue and the only legitimate instruction I had to give her was, “Stop talking! Your mouth is in weird shapes in all the pictures.” But what grand pictures they were. I’ve never had such ease getting shots that really showcase a person’s vibrance. Even with a book in front of her nose, Melissa could never be hidden. The more she reads, the more she knows, and the more she knows, the more she wants to tell everyone about it. As Melissa and so many other brilliant individuals before her have shown, reading is sexy. Case closed.