It began when I was young. My curiosity for looking for the smaller things, the details, that make up the world. The birds I would see every day, I would wonder about them. Their homes, their hobbies, their families. Where would they fly to? Why do they wake up so early and leave their nest? The squirrels I see that scurry around in the bushes, I would try to follow them, their paw prints etched in the grass. The pile of crumbs forming a trail of an unforgettable path.

My mom would shake her head at me when I would stop in the middle of the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks and jumping over them, when I would glance up at the sky to see if there were dark clouds covering the bright afternoon sun, and when I would stand still and enjoy the wind blowing my hair. It was just something that I was fascinated by. I wanted to be a part of the world around me, I wanted to become one with the animals, the buildings, and the views of nature. But, unfortunately, I couldn't capture anything. I didn't own a camera, and when I was young, I didn't know they existed.

Sunrises and sunsets always put me in awe. The colors in the sky I never knew existed, I see for the first time. And that was when I had my own phone. My first phone wasn't that high quality, but it still had a camera. I didn't care about the quality, all I wanted was to capture those pictures; I believed that the beauty of those colors would shine through the old broken down flip phone camera. Clicks after clicks, I would look through the photos at night, trying to find the pictures that I related to, that I felt at ease with. Those pictures came out blurry, but yet, I still smiled through it all.

Year after year, my love for photography grew. Everywhere I go, I would look through the world from different angles. Following different photography blogs on Instagram, I would learn from the top bloggers. I would examine their field of view, and examine their subjects and their background. I would investigate the color schemes and see which colors blend into each other. I would post them on Instagram and count the number of likes I receive. I would constantly validate the number of likes into how many people liked my photography. But little did I know, that was the wrong way to appreciate photography.

I didn't want to take my photography for granted, and sadly, it was exactly what I did. I started to believe beauty was only seen when people liked my posts, and when people didn't, I decided to delete my photos. However, I started to realize that everyone's perspective of beauty was different; that it was subjective, and just because nobody liked my posts, I shouldn't be deleting it. Instagram was my own collection of photos anyway.

Even though it's a problem that every photographer faces, I realize that all my photos are unique, and it shouldn't be according to other people's tastes. It was a collection of my own perspective of beauty and my own life. It shouldn't be described through the opinions of others.