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Pen & Lens
Images influence our relationships, our cultures, and our lives—We create images for you.
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Pen and Lens merges the visual disciplines of design and photography. Run by Becky and Kaleb Dean, the practices and owners amplify one another as iron sharpens iron. The studio’s visual output ranges in scope from photographing weddings, to designing identities for educational institutions, yet is unwavering in its quality. This interdisciplinary approach underpins our pursuit of visual excellence.
We are college best friends turned soul mates, now a husband and wife photography team. It started as a friendship, formed over countless hours drinking juice pouches in the lobby of our college dorm. Kaleb proposed in a photo booth one cold Chicago November, our friends and family gathered twice in one week—in Indiana and Idaho—to celebrate our marriage, and we’ve been adventuring through life together ever since! We love working side by side and supporting each other’s big goals, so being in business together is a dream come true.
We photograph every Pen and Lens wedding together and have a blast doing it! Our photography approaches are as different as the movie snacks we reach for, but we’re both behind the camera to capture YOU—your relationship, your joy, your heart, your day. Kaleb is an artist and an introvert. He’s a calming presence to a groom, captures close up details, has the perfect eye for capturing the glances and emotions our couples share. Becky is an artist and an extrovert. She brings the fun to the photo time, captures iconic and joyful wedding portraits, and cries alongside our couples on almost every wedding day. Together, we promise to host you from behind the camera, to help you feel comfortable, be yourselves, and have the best time doing it! We’re the dream team on your wedding day, but when it comes to guiding you through the wedding process, Becky’s got you! She runs the photography side of Pen and Lens, and will give you all the tools and support you need along the way!
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Kaleb runs our design work, while Becky keeps him in check.
At Pen and Lens Design, we maintain that images shape culture—we make the complex clear, the old new, the formless real, and the aesthetic prevalent. Through strategic thinking, sophisticated form making, and critical engagement, our transverse approach of both physical and digital methods enables us to create successful visual and brand identities, books and editorials, environmental and wayfinding graphics, and communication programs.
Pen, for the sketchbook process and artistry that takes place when Kaleb takes his ideas for visual and brand identities, and entrepreneurial ventures and puts them on paper, and Lens for the way Becky’s artistic and relational heartbeat come alive when she works with clients and captures their personalities and relationships through her camera. But it’s not just about those two aspects of our business: design and photography. We very carefully chose Pen and Lens, because of our vision to expand our business. When it comes down to it, our hearts are for people. We chose a name for our business that will effortlessly envelope the people we hope to educate and mentor, a name they can hold on to as they become a part of our studio and our creative work. Our vision for Pen and Lens is to grow it into a studio of more people than just us. We’re designers and photographers, but deep down we’re also educators, collaborators, leaders, and mentors.
