I’ve always felt more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. When I was younger, my grandmother would buy me disposable cameras and I would take pictures of everything in sight. I got my first DSLR camera in 2014, when I signed up for a photography at my high school. I originally took the class because my girlfriend at the time was in it, but I ended up falling in love with capturing images more than anything. When I first started treating photography like an art, most of the projects that I worked on were heavily reliant on altering images and combing them in interesting ways. More recently, I’ve been trying to focus on more tradition photography projects.

Photography gives me the opportunity to share my perspective with other people. There are a million ways to take a picture of something and the way each person does it is very telling about who they are as an artist and who they are as a person. I also find the idea of capturing a single moment to be very interesting. When I press the shutter button on my camera, I’m able to capture an instant in time that will never happen again.

Recently, I’ve been going on a lot of photography missions by myself. I’ve discovered that driving around and taking pictures is very cathartic for me and I’ve come to look forward to my time alone. One time while I was looking for places and things to photograph, I got horribly lost. I considered turning around and going back the way I came, but I wanted to get more images, so I kept driving down the road I was on. As I came over the crest of a hill, I saw an old set of railroad tracks that ran along a lake. I decided to get out of my car and investigate. On the other side of the tracks, there was a very steep hill that led down to a small beach covered in large rocks. I spent the next twenty minutes climbing along the rocks and taking pictures. I sat down to review some the shots I had taken just a breeze came off the water. I looked up from my camera and realized how content and genuinely happy I was. It’s these moments that make me love photography. I’m able to escape the stresses of everyday life and explore the world around me, even if I’m only twenty minutes from where I live.