The photography community does not discriminate. It does not care for your ethnicity, sexual orientation or GPA. It believes not in equality, but the celebration of everyone’s differences. It allows people to not only find themselves, but create themselves. There is no right answer. From behind the lens, one holds the power to capture time and freeze it forever in the frame. Just as looking through a microscope exposes a life of microorganisms, looking through a camera exposes emotion and thoughts from the deepest corners of the subconscious mind: worlds not visible to the naked eye.

My photography teacher always says that anything and everything is photographable, and once a photo is taken, it and I are part of the history of photography and the space-time continuum. So how can I, or anyone, mark my territory within the community?

In a word: perception.

The average Joe shoots a blurry photo of a tree and uses only one sense, vision, to discard it. I look at the blurry photo and feel a jolt of energy run through my veins and my four other senses are surfaced to life. I hear the desperate pleas of the tree to the woodcutter to spare its life. I feel the beats to the song the tree will sing when it give life to a plethora of fruit and flowers. I smell the fruits ripen and in every bite, I taste the love only a mother could provide her offspring.

In that moment, I know this is where I belong.