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Photography is a potent medium. Speaking without words, it has the ability to unleash emotions in a visceral way. Whether it is fine art, photojournalism, or commercial photography, works by brilliant photographers can touch us deeply.

Think of the impact photography has had on journalism. Before the first reproduction of a photograph by the New York Daily Graphic in 1880, the only news pictures were engravings. Seeing real photographs of news events brought an immediacy never before possible. Imagine opening your newspaper for the first time and seeing images of train wrecks, battles, criminals, or the Worlds’ Fair-suddenly, everything once distant seems very real.

Photography is capable of instilling great emotions us. Majestic images such as Ansel Adams’s black and white photographs of Yellowstone and Yosemite awe us. Barren photos like Margaret Bourke White’s study of rural poverty during the Great Depression overwhelm us. Horrific scenes of our nation’s wars sadden. Brutal scenes of injustice anger us. It is not mere clich to say that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Photographs also reach us personally. From the very beginning, people loved having even the smallest daguerreotype of family members to hold. Civil War soldiers carried pictures of their wives and sweethearts close to their hearts, and they left behind stiff pictures of themselves in uniform. Today, we still handle photographs of our loved ones with reverence and enjoy traveling back in time via stacks of family albums.

Most of us “take pictures”. Few, however, have actually taken a course in photography. Studying photography can lead to any number of career opportunities, or it can help you better capture images of the world around you. If you love looking at your surrounding through the eye of a lens, if you love the weight of a good camera in your hands, why not see where that feeling can take you?