How a photo makes you feel is subjective. We all take photos throughout our lives of special events, where we've travelled, our children, beautiful views and so on and when we look at them they bring back memories and the emotion of that time and place. These images most probably won't be winning prizes for composition or be showcased on the cover of magazines but they are beautiful to us because they are our memories, our experiences. But what is it that makes a photo universally amazing? A photo that when you look at it you can't look away or you have to share it with a friend. A photo has to make you feel something, happy, sad, angry, aroused. For it to be great it has to elicit some kind of profound visceral reaction from a broad audience. This is what I strive for in my photography. I hope that when I show my images to someone, or they come across them online, that they stop and say this is beautiful or this makes me think or they just want to soak it up. I know that my photography is a work in progress and that it will always be. What I also know is that with each photo I take I get closer to that place, to that emotion. Every time I take the time to think about what it is that I am seeing through the lens my images get better. I read a post by Brett Birdsong called "Shoot What Matters" on dedpxl.com and it resonated with me. He talks about shooting from the heart and not worrying about what shots people say you should get or "what some intoxicated intern behind a desk at a wedding blog tells you that you should see". I could spend the rest of my life shooting the things that I know will rack up likes or comments in my feeds or I could do something different. I could shoot what I love and put my heart into each and every image, leaving a little bit of me in each pixel.