Photography. “It’s a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.”-Anonymous.

Photography helps people understand their feelings when words no longer can help. For example, in the movie, Flags of Our Fathers when the picture of the men standing up the flag was released to the general public, it gave everyone a sense of hope. Hope that their son, nephew, maybe a best friend, just might come home to their loving arms. Hope that after everything, maybe, just maybe, we have hope of winning the war. That one photograph gave back to society a bit of happiness that the war stole away.

Photography has been one of the many things to benefit from the advances in modern technology. With that, cameras have become something that almost every single person carries around. For most people, their camera is on their phone. But for others, they find it enjoyable to carry a regular camera around. No matter what a person prefers, they have one base reason to do so. To capture the moment. A single picture can make a heart feel so fulfilled. Every parent has a favorite picture of the child as a baby, and every teenager has their favorite picture with their friends.

Photography also helps us share our lives with the people we love. We post photos of ourselves, the food we eat, our vacations, and then of course there are the random photos we take. All of these photos become what other people, and even sometimes ourselves, think of as me. However, this has some major problems that go along. People always want to show the good side of themselves, so then photography, the internet (and its tools) becomes the perfect tool to do so. We use tools like photoshop to remove blemishes from our skin, whiten our teeth, make our eyebrows the perfect shape. No wonder Photoshop has the nickname “unnatural”. This all comes from being bombarded by the appearance of celebrities and models who we see as “flawless”. It’s gradually become a habit that society is addicted to.

With all of that being said Photography has many things that make it so important to us. It helps us understand our usually complicated feelings and emotions, it gives us something to hold onto from the past, and it gives us the ups and downs of social media.