I am not, and will never be, a great photojournalist.

From the first week of my freshman year through the summer of 2009, a camera strap was as essential a piece of clothing to me as my underwear. I inhaled campus through my camera lens. The benchmark for my success was capturing spontaneous campus moments, and I was determined to miss nothing.

And I was pretty good at it. Though I wasn't the best among the people I worked with, I carried my weight as long as I carried my camera.

Yet, even during those formative years of being a photojournalist, I struggled with the implications of keeping my face guarded behind the comfort of a camera rather than engaging with my subject. No photographer shoots the trial of a condemned man for the first time without becoming a little nauseated at his or her semi-disgusting, awkward role in that moment of the man's life — as photographers, we profit from the lowest points in others' lives.

It wasn't until I left the comfort of Ann Arbor and immersed myself in a foreign culture that this suppressed self-loathing escaped and I was no longer able to maintain my relationship with my camera.

I spent May of 2009 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, working on short documentaries to raise money for and awareness of the global issue of avoidable blindness. I lived outside the city with five fabulously talented creators and documentarians — all students — working on the project with me. Everyone was a photographer.

As a visitor in an environment where the cost of your equipment could easily feed 5,000 of the city's inhabitants for one day, it's essential to carry yourself with some tact. As a group, we succeeded in doing so while working on location. We maintained a strict rule of only keeping one camera out at a time. Three of us would work in one section of the hospital and three in another.

As the producer, I let the people who were best at their jobs do their jobs, and I enjoyed the luxury of leaving my camera at home. For the first week, however, I ached for my camera like a smoker quittin’ cold turkey, forced to watch "Madmen" all day.

After a few days, my cravings subsided and I took in my environment with a naked eye. I began to notice nuances in our subjects.

In reality, these were visible through the lens but somehow they were obstructed by the process of photographing. In still images, there is a look in the eye of sad subject that translates into a desperate call for sympathy. In real time — without a lens — the thin layer of moisture covering the shape of the eye doesn't ask for understanding, but instead screams of embarrassed disdain.

I stopped caring about missing the photographic opportunities these moments offered. For the first time, I saw without the filter of a lens.

During our time in Tanzania we took a short, 36-hour vacation to Zanzibar, a place possessing the kind of beauty that should only be allowed in dreams. I was the sole member of the group to leave my camera behind.

We trekked through the city all day and walked to the beach for dinner as the sun set.

There is probably a scientific reason why the same sun I've always seen is so much more stunning in Africa, but I don't know it. It was a sunset that begged with every ray to be photographed — hundreds of people overlooking the pier were silhouetted perfectly.

I hung back and spoke with our guide while the rest of the group snapped for the best shot. I began to feel something I still can't explain as I looked at the people above the water. Not knowing exactly why, I quickly and quietly approached each member of our group and told them to put their cameras down.

Lowering their cameras, the group retreated. Then I joined the Tanzanians overlooking the water to find a dead, drowned body float closer to the beach, one of 50 that had drowned after a cargo ship sank not far off the coast.

I came back to the Daily as a photojournalist unable to shake this sort of experience from my consciousness — I envy and respect the photojournalist that could have. It is that kind of photojournalist that presses on in an effort to give the public the truest visual information from the most difficult circumstances. All that's left for me is documenting my own life, and the seemingly futile enterprise of creating meaningful art.

— Zachary Meisner was the Daily's co-managing photo editor in 2009.