I have always had a love of photography.
Sitting with my grandma, looking at photographs while she told me about the stories behind them. That was a connection and a moment made permanent. In high school, disposable cameras were all the rage and waiting to find out how many of those 32 photos were usable was always an adventure in hope and disappointment. Then came the first era of digital cameras, and honestly? I took the pictures, but they never really moved off the disk. Between middle school and grad school there is not an abundance of photographic evidence of adventures.
As I have grown and ahem matured ahem, so has my eye for photography. Each lesson and season in my life has helped shape how I see the world, and how I choose to photograph it. This is that story.
The very first time I used a camera with all the settings, detachable lens, and everything, I felt like a professional. The real education came when a friend who ran her own wedding photography business asked me to be her assistant photographing actual ceremonies and receptions. Yes, mistakes were made. Yes, she had the very patient job of deleting many of the first rounds of my photos where I did not get the lighting right. But that’s where I learned the basics of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.
After that summer, I bought my first camera. I will admit, I chose it because I thought it was cute and it wasn’t entirely out of my budget; two extremely reasonable criteria for a major purchase. This was when I started photographing everything. I’d adjust the settings, take a handful, and then as a gut check switch it to Auto to see what the camera thought I should do. Honestly, that was a huge help in the beginning. It was a built-in reality check, and if I was ever too unsure but really wanted the photo, I could just let the camera take the wheel.
What I learned and what no one tells you at the beginning, is that Auto is making decisions for you. And the camera doesn’t know what you’re trying to say. It just knows light and math. I didn’t know I had anything to say yet either, so it worked well.
There are incredible photographers out there who will walk you through any camera model you could have questions about. I spent hours watching their videos, learning as much as I could. I did learn. I also forgot. I still sometimes forget in the moment and that’s okay. There is a particular kind of humbling that comes from reviewing 200 photos from a session and realizing four of them are in focus. You will laugh. Eventually. Not right away.
The trip that let me flex my skills was our two-week adventure in Europe (more on that coming soon!). Emily even announced on the flight over that she was so confident in my photography that she’d be taking minimal photos herself and simply enjoying the scenery because she’d just use mine. No pressure, right??!!
Europe stretched my skills in the best possible way. Even six years later, I’m genuinely happy with how those photos turned out. I’ve told Emily we need to go back so I can photograph the same locations again and see the difference. Take Budapest, for example. We visited the Fisherman’s Bastion at dusk to look out over the river and the city, and the lighting was this harsh yellow that I simply did not know how to work with. Everything from inside carries that yellow tint. I also made the mistake of not bringing any kind of tripod. My camera at the time struggled in darker environments without support. Some of those photos have the softest edges which I absolutely did not intend and desperately wish wasn’t there.
But they exist. And they’re part of the story.
Here’s what most tutorials don’t warn you about: there’s a long, awkward stretch between understanding your settings intellectually and feeling them instinctively.
You will stand in a field at golden hour with perfect theoretical knowledge of what your settings should be. You might still miss the photo because your hands fumbled, or you second-guessed yourself, or the light shifted. I have photographs from this era that are technically correct and completely soulless. Properly exposed. Horizon level. Sharp. And somehow…. nothing. The camera did exactly what I told it to. I just hadn’t figured out what I actually wanted to tell it.
This is the part nobody talks about because it’s uncomfortable. You’ve left the blissful ignorance of Auto. You’re not yet fluent in your own creative language. And everything you make feels like a homework assignment rather than art.
Push through that awkward phase anyway. It matters that you push through it.
I can’t point to one single photograph that turned a corner for me. But I remember the trip.
I flew to Grand Teton National Park for the first time, and as I drove north toward Yellowstone, I stopped to catch a few sunset photos before continuing on. The setting was so serene, so quietly extraordinary, that I changed my plans on the spot and stayed in the Tetons for three more days.
I got the exposure wrong on half of them. But among the mistakes were two or three frames where something real happened; where I had felt the moment before I’d calculated it.
That’s the thing no one can teach you and you cannot rush. The moment when the technical knowledge sinks below conscious thought and becomes instinct. When you stop thinking f/2.8 at 1/500 and start thinking this light is soft and I want to hold it gently.
Something else happened slowly, without me noticing until it was already true. I started being drawn to the same kinds of things, over and over again.
Quiet moments. Detail over spectacle. The in-between seconds and not the posed smile, but the laugh just after. Not the mountain vista, but the flowers in the field in the foreground. Light through fabric. Shadows doing something interesting on a wall or really anywhere.
I used to think I needed to photograph everything. That more subjects meant more growth. What I actually needed was to pay closer attention to less.
Your artistic voice isn’t something you construct. It’s something you notice by looking back at your own work and recognizing the threads that were there all along, the things your eye keeps returning to whether you planned it or not.
Mine returned to stillness. To the small and overlooked. To the feeling of a place rather than the postcard version of it. To slightly darker silhouettes and always, always chasing those moments of light.
Yours will be something else. And it will be yours even when it surprises you.
I’d tell her to use Auto for as long as she needs to, without shame. I’d tell her that blurry photos are data, not failures. That the goal of learning settings is to eventually forget about them.
I’d tell her that comparison is the fastest way to lose the thread of her own vision and that the photographer she’s comparing herself to has ten more years of missed photos behind their highlights reel.
I’d tell her that the expensive camera doesn’t make you a photographer. The hours do. The noticing does. The willingness to make something bad in service of eventually making something true.
And I’d tell her to go back and look at all those photos from Europe and that one perfect sunset photo from Northern Michigan taken on that old camera. One day they’ll make her laugh and then they’ll make her proud. Not because they’re perfect, but because of how far the journey went from there.
