Undeclared(28)

“Why is that? I thought pictures needed a lot of light.”

“Full sun is great for taking photos of the sky, but it casts hard shadows and makes even really beautiful people look kind of awful. You have to have a lot of experience to take good full sun pictures, and I’m not there yet.”

Noah opened his mouth, but I jumped in to add, “And don’t say that’s why I should major in art, because the best way to become a better photographer is just to practice.”

“Fair enough. Tell me about how you create these pictures that look like Bo’s old mechanical football game with the tiny plastic guys.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

After climbing the three flights of stairs to a messy room at the top of the Delt house, I was grateful Noah was carrying my bag and tripod. Lana and I were both a bit winded, as was Jack, who escorted us up. Two younger Delts stood in the room frantically trying clean up, but it was too late. While a path from the door to the windows had been cleared, it still smelled like old socks and pizza boxes. Red plastic cups lay haphazardly on their sides, and the two desks pushed away from the window were piled high with video game boxes, textbooks, and a variety of T-shirts.

“Sorry,” Jack said as we entered. He glared at the two fleeing Delts. It looked like someone was likely to get a house punishment later.

I took my tripod from Noah, and set it in front of the window. “Can we take the screen out?” I asked Jack.

“Sure.” He walked over and peered around the sill. I could tell he didn’t know how to remove it. Noah gently nudged him aside and pulled two clips from the bottom, tugged the screen out and set it aside.

I pulled out my camera and clipped the base onto the tripod. Noah stepped closer until his arm brushed mine.

For a moment, I just paused. It seemed too unreal that Noah was standing next to me while I was taking a photograph. I wanted to yell at him, and, at the same time, I wanted to burrow under his arm and wrap myself in his scent. I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath to clear my head, but instead my nose filled with the clean, warm male aroma that made me think of parks in mid-spring when all the greenery was sprouting and there was freshly turned dirt in all the flower beds.

“So Lana, you do this stuff too?” Jack’s overly loud voice reminded me why we were all here. Or at least why I was here. And it wasn’t to sniff Noah’s T-shirt and imagine we were running through a field of daisies.

“‘This stuff’ as in photography?” Lana replied, waving in my direction as I positioned my camera. I peered through the lens and saw Amy signaling me from across the street. I debated whether I should get a stronger zoom lens out.

“Um, yeah.” Jack sounded confused by the impatient tone in Lana’s voice.

“I told you last night I was a psych major.”

“Oh, ah, that’s right.” Clearly Jack had little memory of the night. Too many tequila shots. “So a psych major. That’s like head stuff.”

Noah and I looked at each other, and I could read his expression just as well as he could read mine. We shared a private grin. Jack’s presidency here at the Delts wasn’t due to his big brain. Either that or Jack’s ability to think was being short-circuited by Lana’s presence. This was a definite possibility. If anyone I knew belonged on a magazine cover, it was Lana.

She was one of my favorite subjects, although she rarely allowed me to take her picture. Her eating disorder left her with a distorted self-image, and, though the photographs I took of her showed how gorgeous she was, she never quite believed I didn’t use some secret photography trick. I’d given up trying to explain that the distortion happens in her head and not with my lens. But I guess we all had our blind spots. Mine was standing right next to me, so I couldn’t judge Lana too harshly.

“Tell me how this works,” Noah ordered. I refrained from rolling my eyes and saluting. If I did, it might give him the idea he could give me instructions all the time.

“Most of the time, when you take a picture, you are trying to take a straight-on photograph. With tilt shift, you’re tricking the eye into thinking you’re seeing something closer than it really is by focusing on a point or object from a distance and then blurring the edges. I have the camera on the rails so it can move up and down,” I gestured toward the two thin metal rods on either side of the camera. “The tilt is the pivot here on the lens.” I moved the lens and tilted it up and down to show how it hinged at angles away from the body of the camera. “Some real pros can do it without all this equipment, and some just use computer hacks.”