Walking through the halls of HHS takes you past mostly nondescript walls and empty doorframes. However, as soon as you pass geography teacher Cara Walton’s door, you already know that she is, well, something else.

The front of her door features several pictures she has taken—and they range from close-ups of eyes, to flowers, to CNN-featured—even to one featuring Boba Fett, a Star Wars character. As another teacher approaches her, she stops her commentary on photos to have a debate about Star Wars Storm Trooper and clones. On the inside, tie-dyed sheets explode on the windows, while maps and posters of ancient Mesopotamians cover the concrete walls. And as she answered my questions, I could not help but notice the dozens of photos she has taken that are hung up around her desk.

Walton’s interest in photography started when her father gave her his old 35 mm (using film, rather than being a digital camera) Minolta camera and a set of lenses that he had used when they lived in Europe. While attending Bridgewater College here in the Valley, she worked as the Photography Editor for the college paper, The Talon.

“Photography is something that I do just because I love it,” Cara said.

But as her senior year of college approached, she dropped her title as Photography Editor and even stopped photography as a hobby all together. With two choral ensembles, theatre activities, and a student teaching job taking up her time—not to mention planning a wedding (to HHS’s librarian and her co-forensics coach Bradley Walton), she was not hesitant in taking a break.

“I just had a lot on my plate,” Walton said, shrugging. “It was a time issue.”

During her sabbatical away from photography, Walton also took up artistic projects like origami and tie-dye.

“She was always an artistic person,” Bradley Walton remembered. “She always had to have art.”

It was not until last spring when a chat room that she was a part of started a ‘photography thread’, where they began to post pictures. After remembering how much she enjoyed taking pictures, she pulled out her ‘point and shoot’ camera, which is the term for cameras that do not have lenses, and revived her photography hobby, with some encouragement from her husband and several of the people in her chat room.

Her husband is an avid supporter of her work, though he himself does not actually take pictures. He uses photography as more of a way for remembering moments rather than art.

“I don’t attempt to be artistic; I see it as more of a utilitarian thing,” Bradley said. “It’s like, oh. There’s my daughter. She’s nine, and she won’t be nine long. I guess I’d better take a picture.”

Cara finds inspiration in everyday things that catch her eye; the majority of her projects are spontaneous. However, at times, she plans to go on excursions for the sole purpose of taking pictures. And Bradley is always happy to accompany her.

“One weekend, she wanted to go to a cemetery,” Bradley said. “And I just said, ‘well, okay!’”

She usually gravitates toward the same sort of pictures—artistic-style photos over journalistic ones.

“I hated taking pictures of sports events in college,” Cara said.

Macrophotography is a style of photography that she enjoys, where the subject material is magnified and shown from a close-up perspective. Another running topic that Cara is fascinated with is the concept of, as she calls it, “beauty in decay”, referring to old buildings, usually shot in black and white images.

“Black and white images capture a level of contrast and emotion that is really beautiful,” Cara said.

Cara has also been recognized for her work nationally. She submitted a photo she took of a beach during sunrise while on a vacation to a CNN contest. After no response for a long time, she had nearly forgotten about it, when she suddenly received an email from CNN asking her to clarify information about her photo. Several weeks later, she went onto the CNN site and saw that they had used her picture as CNN’s Travel Photo of the Day.

“I ran out of my class, down the hall, screaming,” Cara laughed. “The kids in my class must have been wondering what was wrong with me.”

While Cara likes being the one behind the camera, she used to hate being the actual subject. To force herself out of her comfort zone and challenge herself, she is doing a project where she takes one self-portrait everyday for an entire year.

“I’m pushing myself to try new things,” Cara said. “Plus, I get to be creative—I come home and ask myself, what can I do [for my picture] today?”

Photography is still just a hobby at the moment, but she plans to take professional classes to grasp a better understanding of it in the future. Even since she started, she has noticed an improvement in her own work, having to crop less empty space out of her pictures and being able to frame her shots more easily. She might not be considering photography as a career, but she knows that she will continue taking pictures.

“If I was paid, that’d be great,” Cara said. “But no matter what, I’d do it.”