I became a photographer when I was 13-years-old and experienced a bad time of depression. There’s something about the times in your life when nothing seems to be going right that makes you enthralled by the idea of taking captive whatever beauty you can find, even the most minuscule pieces of it. A blade of grass coming up in between cracks in the pavement. Tiny snowflakes desperately clinging to your sweater sleeve. The halo of sunlight shining through tree branches late in the afternoon.

It’s incredible to pick up a camera and capture a shot that makes a friend or family member say, “Wow, that’s a leaf? That’s really just a leaf? I didn’t know the colors looked like that up close.”

Well, they do. The seemingly small things actually have a lot to offer – they just get overlooked until someone points them out to us. This is true in nature, in other people, in ourselves. This is true for entire situations. What a hopeful and freeing thought this has been for me.

More than anything, photography has made me appreciate all of the phenomenal things about the world – about our entire lives, even – that we simply pass over in favor of what appears to be bigger and better. That’s the motto of our society, isn’t it? Bigger, better, stronger, faster, hotter, smarter. We’re always looking for more when we should revel in the joy and beauty and goodness that we’ve already been given but haven’t really savored.

Yeah, a photo of the Grand Canyon will blow your mind, but so will a photo of a microscopic snowflake.

An ocean is beautiful, but so is a bright yellow leaf floating in a puddle of rain water.

A butterfly is mesmerizing, but so is a tiny ant carrying a crumb twice its size to the colony underground.

There is so much beauty and goodness still available to us in this corrupt world if we only have the eyes to see it. There are so many moments in our life that pass us by before we realize how amazing they are, just like those perfect photos that you weren’t fast enough to take – before the bird flew away, before the sun disappeared behind the mountains or before the child blew out the birthday candles.

Don’t miss it. Don’t miss these parts of your life, the ones that seem insignificant but are really the very things you’ll remember when you breathe your last breath on Earth.

It took a lens frame with borders and a mind without them to teach me that.