At the start of 2024, I volunteered as a photographer for my university’s events. Honestly? I didn’t think much of it. I had a camera, I had some free time, and it seemed like a low-stakes way to contribute. I had no idea it would quietly rearrange my whole relationship with the people around me.
My first assignment was something like International Day — a room full of students from Myanmar, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and a dozen other countries, all waving tiny flags and laughing at each other’s jokes. I remember fumbling with the settings while everyone posed for the group shot, half-convinced I was going to ruin every frame. I didn’t. But more than that, something clicked — not just the shutter.
“The best moment is always the one just before or just after the official photo.”
That observation changed everything about how I shoot. I stopped trying to capture people at their most composed. I started waiting — for the laugh that breaks mid-sentence, for the hand-wave that goes a beat too long, for the exact second someone forgets the camera is there.
Thingyan water fight on campus — nobody was trying to look good, and that’s exactly why it worked.
By the time Thingyan came around in 2026, I wasn’t nervous anymore. I was hunting. There is something about a water fight on a university lawn — the golden late-afternoon light, students in Hawaiian shirts completely drenched — that makes every frame a gift. One person is pointing a water gun at someone three meters away. Two others are screaming and running. Somewhere in the background, a group that hasn’t been hit yet is choosing between helping and filming. I shot all of it.
The selfie nobody planned, and the quiet group under the tent — both worth keeping.
What I’ve learned is that photographs of people enjoying themselves are, in a strange way, more honest than any portrait. Nobody is performing for you. The guy taking a wide-angle selfie with his whole friend group doesn’t care how his jaw looks — he cares that everyone fits in the frame. The girls posing the peace signs are not thinking about the light. That unselfconsciousness is exactly what makes the image beautiful.
I also started noticing details I would have walked past before: the thanakha paste on cheekbones at a Burmese celebration, the particular way someone holds a plastic cup of iced coffee when they’re mid-story, the chaos of flags pinned to a corkboard that represents half a dozen different countries and still somehow makes sense as a single image.
Two years ago I thought volunteering to take photos was something I’d do once and quietly retire from. Now I look forward to it more than almost anything else on my calendar. Not because I want the credit — most of the people in my photos don’t know my name. But because there is an enormous privilege in being the person who gets to stand slightly outside the celebration, pay close attention, and make sure no one forgets what it looked like to be exactly this happy, exactly here, exactly now.
If you’re a student on the fence about volunteering for something creative and low-pressure — pick up the camera. The worst outcome is a few blurry shots. The best outcome is that you fall completely in love with watching people live their lives.
Tags: Photography · Student Life · Volunteering · Thingyan