As much as I love photography, I find myself a little bit too lazy to go out and shoot sometimes. I also find that once I get into it again, I really enjoy shooting.

There's just one problem: I'm really subjective when it comes to optimal lighting and otherwise optimal conditions for shooting. I don't have a ton of equipment, lenses, artificial lighting, and I don't own a tripod. I don't have a ton of money either, being a college student. However, that will all change eventually. I feel if I let go of my inhibitions that disallow me to jump into the wilderness and shoot whatever I see, I'll grow as a photographer.

I'm currently studying Civil Engineering at Michigan State University and I'm having the time of my life. Sort of. Studying for exams and homework sucks, but that's life. Everything else about it is awesome. I've never had so much fun in my life. I have the greatest friends both here, and back at home in Portage, Michigan, and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Maybe some of the things they do...but the people themselves, never. :)

I urge you to test yourself and your opinions on good photography. Does the picture look over-edited? Does it look plausible? Is it photography? Or is it an over-emphasized imagination-based image created mostly in Photoshop that causes it to be mostly a "painting" rather than a photo.

The reason I say this is because a ton of people utilize a photo editing software to composite two or more images together, to make a single piece of artwork, that in my opinion, is not a photograph. A photograph is a single still moment in time that you captured when your finger depressed the shutter-release. I am completely for people who edit the colors of their pictures to portray what they actually saw, because let's face it, our cameras can be stubborn sometimes. They don't always capture what we want them to. But when someone takes a picture of themselves in a room, standing, then cuts themselves out of the photo and edits another photo so they appear as if they're floating, it's not photography. It's art. Which is fine. I have nothing against art. Photography is a form of it, but it can't be switched around. This is however, just my opinion, and you can form your own, but I take photos because I love to capture the life around me, not because I want to create a false life.