This is one of my favorite shots this summer. It may be one of my favorite shots ever. What makes it, obviously, are the butt cheeks: pale half moons set against his tanned back and his dinosaur swim trunks. The leap is awesome, of course, as is his shadow (such a Peter Pan shadow, that: the kind that seems to need to be stitched to one’s feet, lest it frolic away to do its own leaping and bounding), but it’s the butt cheeks that are – as Roland Barthes would have it – the punctum, the singular element of the photograph that grabs your eye and heart all at once. It is the butt cheeks, in all of their Coppertone ad perfection, that say – more loudly than the surf, more forcefully than the sand – little boy in summer.

It is the butt cheeks that I will cry over, some day, when he is big and grown and no longer frolics at the beach with such abandon. It is the butt cheeks.

— How I got the photo, beyond the framing of the butt cheeks, which I didn’t even notice until after I’d taken the shot (is this always true of the punctum, that it’s accidental?): on the iPhone, with attention to the angle of the light such that that marvelous shadow was in the frame. Edited in Snapseed with Tune Image function (tweaked Ambience) and then Drama filter (maximum filter, maximum saturation.) Uploaded to Instagram with no further fiddling. Camera+ frame added for the purposes of this post.

You see how this post is on my Intel Digital Life page? That’s because I wrote it with my Intel hat on, which is totally a little foil beanie that receives satellite transmissions from the galaxy of AWESOME. Or something. Anyway, it’s part of the series that you see here, on this humble page, about living la vida digital, which is also part of this whole storytelling exercise over here, on Facebook. You should check it out.