A picture is worth a thousand words, yet I am silent. To speak would be to disrupt the moment I am to capture. Whether I am in the middle of a large, noisy crowd or completely alone, the photo remains quiet, forever still, an instant in time that will never be experienced in the same way again.

I started taking pictures on a disposable camera that my mom had bought me for my sixth-grade school field trip. I never really got the chance to use it, mainly because I used all the film on the bus ride over.

Thus began my love of taking pictures, one that developed into a love of photography.

It is an art that everyone can practice, but few appreciate or really even understand. It is for these and many other reasons that I fell in love with photography.

I love seeing the world through the viewfinder of my camera. It seems smaller, quieter that way. People always smile at you when you look at them, and it's easy to pretend that they're really smiling at you, but in reality, it's because they know that the second you push that button any face they are making will be frozen in time forever.

Time seems to slow before capturing the image, and I live for those few seconds of calm. It is both an adrenaline rush and a flow of norepinephrine, a feeling most people spend their whole lives looking for. I love the time before the picture when the world seems to move in slow motion.

I never feel more powerful than when I am behind the lens, strap around my neck and a beautiful nature scene in front of me, begging to be immortalized. I feel in control, almost powerful and godlike, in that I can control how others will perceive this moment from now, make it tinted and surreal, or leave it as is.

I feel that I am defying time, stealing seconds that were only meant to be experienced once in a lifetime, and living them whenever I please.

A photograph is worth more than a thousand words. It is every word that the photographer wanted you to see, whether that be a million adjectives or a single expression that is forever ingrained in your mind.

That's what I think life really is. Just a jumble of memories that have been changed ever so slightly by our minds as time goes on until we believe that's what reality is. We edit our lives so that others looking at them will feel a certain way, whatever way we want them to feel.

I believe that is why the saying uses the word 'picture' rather than 'photograph' because a photograph is unable to be quantified, just like us. You can never put one person into one word or one idea, they are a plethora of things, as a picture is of pixels.