One Camera, Fifteen Teenagers, and a Million Little Bubbles

Every Wednesday, without fail, I waited. Not for a grade. Not for gossip. For the Photography Club, one hour, once a week, with fifteen students and one slightly overused school camera. You would think that would be limiting. But it was the exact opposite.

While other clubs were using fancy microscopes and huge canvases, we were out in the school garden, squatting in the dirt, chasing light beams, getting way too excited over a ladybug crawling on a leaf. No one was trying to “look aesthetic.” We were finding the aesthetic. Big difference.

And then came that one day, when we wandered behind the hostel into the school’s hidden kitchen garden. It felt like we had walked into a forgotten secret. Wild herbs, sunlit soil, grasshopper that refused to pose, and the kind of silence that makes you feel something. That day, the photos we took were not just “pictures.” They were moments.

That is the biggest thing I have learned:

Photos are like bubbles: tiny, delicate, floating pauses in time. They hold pieces of our lives that would have otherwise dissolved into memory. And when you look at a photo and feel something all over again that’s when you know it was real.

I used to think photography was about balance, rule of thirds, colour grading all that technical stuff. But honestly? It is deeper. A good photo does not shout “look at me.” It whispers something only a few people will notice. It makes you feel. It preserves what words sometimes can not.

It is not about forced smiles or posed perfection. It is about catching a laugh mid-air, a beam of light dancing on cracked tiles, or the quiet in-between moments, the ones that are easy to miss but impossible to forget once captured.

This year taught me something I did not expect:

That the most powerful art does not always need grandeur or symmetry.

Sometimes, it is just one imperfect photo…

taken by a student…

on a shared camera…

in a forgotten corner of a school garden.

And yet, in that frame, lives a truth more honest than any filter can offer a feeling, a story, a moment suspended in time.

That is what photography became for me. Not a skill. Not a hobby.

But a way of seeing.

Of pausing.

Of remembering that even the smallest moments are worth holding onto.

Because in the end, we are all just trying to hold on to our bubbles, before they disappear.