Learning how to become a better photographer is more about the experience and the friends you make along the way rather than the pictures you have in the end. However, having cool pictures is always nice!

I was living in Tempe, Arizona after having moved there from Pocatello, Idaho at 7 years old. Every year we would go back to visit our friends that we missed dearly. My Nana and Papa were two of those friends and were very special people in our lives. There was no blood relationship, but they were what we called our “adopted grandparents.” Neither set of grandparents lived nearby, but after my parents befriended them during their square dancing years, our families became very close.

On my ninth or tenth birthday, my Nana and Papa gave me a small point-and-shoot camera as a gift. It was plastic, but I remember it came with a little booklet and some rolls of film. I ran all over the place with that little camera taking pictures of birds and bunnies and trees and probably a lot of my cats (I guess that hasn’t changed!). From there, I think I got some disposable cameras and eventually upgraded to a “real” camera.

As the years went by, I continued to take pictures sporadically. I remember taking my camera on school field trips and snapping pictures of my friends. I even remember some pictures that were technically “selfies,” but long before that word was in our vocabulary. Through high school, I was taking pictures of our marching band events, friends, and parties. I remember the excitement of dropping off several rolls of film after a band trip to Europe and then the bigger excitement of going to Walgreens several days later to pick up the pictures. No instant gratification back then! 

But through all those years of taking pictures, I never thought about it as being a skill. A “photographer” was that person at Sears who put boxes on the ground for you to sit on and pose awkwardly while a bright flash would blind you. That was all a photographer was in my mind.

When I finally got around to taking college seriously, I signed up for Photography 101 at Santa Monica Community College. I had my fancy camera (still no DSLRs) that I only knew how to use in the Auto (A) mode. I eagerly sat through class and I remember by the end of the first lecture, I was overwhelmed. The professor had put a bunch of numbers on the board that I scribbled into my notebook and we had to memorize them. There were numbers if it was sunny out. Numbers if it was cloudy. Numbers if we were moving. Numbers if the subject was moving. It was just a bunch of jumble and I am terrible at remembering arbitrary numbers. I had no foundation for what these numbers represented or how they related to each other.

We had our first assignment that was taking pictures of movement. I bought the film we were told to, studied my notes carefully and very hesitantly took my camera off of A and onto M (Manual). I remember taking pictures of moving cars and trees blowing in the wind and probably several pictures of my cat. I moved the numbers around as my notes told me to, but I had no clue what I was doing. We weren’t allowed to get our film developed at Walgreens (because that’s not “professional” *eye roll*). I dropped the film off at the fancy (aka expensive) place and waited the few days for it to be ready.

When I picked up the film, it was about 30 pictures of blur, darkness, and disappointment. I remember not a single picture turning out even remotely decent. None of them were even artsy enough for me to name Movement and pretend the tree was supposed to be blurry. Talk about being deflated.

I showed up to class the next week and watched my classmates showing off their pictures or complaining that theirs didn’t turn out either. I even heard a couple of people talking about how they put their cameras back onto A just to be sure they had some that turned out well enough for a passing grade. I guess cheating hadn’t crossed my mind!

As we sat through the second class, the professor droned on about numbers and exposure and aperture and all those words that had zero meaning to me. After we were excused, I walked over to the student services center and filled out the drop-classes form. I tucked the camera into the back of my closet and went on with my life.

Several years later, the DSLR cameras came out–you could actually SEE the picture right after you took it! This was magic! And a game changer, right?! I was finally going to be able to take some real pictures, right?!

Wrong.

I signed up for Photography 101 again and got another professor that talked about numbers for an hour then she didn’t show up for the next two classes and I bailed again. I decided that I could never be good at photography because I couldn’t memorize numbers.

Then the iPhone came out and I was, yet again, enjoying taking pictures of my cat. The years passed and technology advanced and I was pretty happy with my iPhone photos lightly edited using the built-in editing tools. Life was good. I wasn’t a photographer, but I had some cool pictures on my phone (never printed, of course).

In the summer of 2013 my parents went up near Sacramento, California to visit my mom’s family, and somehow the two of them started getting into taking pictures. Dad was retired now and they were doing more traveling and he needed a hobby to fill his time (of course it had to be an expensive one!). They came across a Groupon for a weekend photography class up there in the Sac area.

We had no clue that their decision to take that class forever changed all of our lives. The class was taught by a husband and wife duo named David and Ally McKay. Their business, McKay Live, teaches photography out of a classroom on nights and weekends, but they also do photography tours all over the world. My parents took their class, signed up for a trip to Ireland, and that was the moment all my future money would disappear.

When mom and dad returned from Ireland, I was looking through their pictures and my desire to learn how to be a photographer (and travel the world taking pictures) was awoken. I knew I needed to get over my aversion to numbers and figure out that hunk of electronics. They told me that the way the McKays teach doesn’t require memorizing any numbers. That was all I needed to hear.

I don’t remember all of the events and what order they came in, but I signed up to go with mom and dad to a McKay photography tour to Joshua Tree and photograph star trails. A middle of the night shoot? This night owl was totally down with that! Of course, just about every tour with the McKays after that has had VERY EARLY morning wake up calls! The term “chasing the light” is now synonymous with “set your alarm for 3am.”

Before I went on that tour, my parents convinced me to fly up to Sac and take the weekend-long class and learn about those dreaded numbers. The style of teaching the McKays use was like a bright light when trying to read a book in the pitch black. It all became so clear. Yes, there are numbers, but it wasn’t about memorization. It was about how they correlate to each other and to the subject you are photographing. I learned the meaning of those weird words like ISO, shutter speed, and aperture and how they relate to one another (the “triangle” as it is called). After two days of class and one evening out on location I put my camera on M and haven’t looked back.

As a teacher myself, I have always strived to be able to find ten ways to teach something to ten different people. Experiences like this always solidify my belief that being an effective teacher is not only about knowing the subject well, but being able to explain it in several ways to different learning personalities. I was not built to memorize numbers without any foundation to apply them to. Finding a teacher that didn’t ask that of me changed my photography game forever.

I’ve been taking pictures for several years now, and I have grown in my skills exponentially over these past years. I have been all over the world with the McKays and every new trip I learn new settings and become more confident in my picture taking. I look back at the pictures I took on my first few trips and the pictures I took on my most recent trips and the difference is amazing.

My family jokes about having joined a “McKult” because we are in a group of people that would pretty much follow David and Ally anywhere and everywhere they go while giving them all our money along the way. I’ve also become good friends with their other instructors (shout out to David Carr and Toby Gelston!) and many of their clients. We meet up all over the world with our cameras in hand, ready to experience new and wonderful things. There is no bond-building stronger than being in the middle of Mongolia and photographing eagle hunters, sleeping in a freezing (or burning hot) ger (yurt), and eating unfamiliar foods. These people have the same amount of passion for travel and photography as I do. And we are all crazy enough to stay up until midnight to photograph a full moon and then wake up at 3am to drive an hour to photograph a sunrise.

I’m not quite ready to call myself a “photographer” in the professional sense, but I hope to someday feel comfortable enough to give myself that label.

In truth, I just use photography as an excuse to travel. I like to quietly chase lions around with my lens in the Serengeti; hunt for interesting mushrooms in the Redwoods; capture woodpeckers perched in trees outside our RV window; and silently sit and wait for baby foxes to come out of their den and play in Grand Tetons National Park.

Photography is my excuse to travel. It’s an excuse to get outside in the fresh air of this beautiful world. And it is an excuse to visit places that aren’t on the cover of travel books. I never pass up a chance to go and explore something new, learn how to photograph it, and see my friends. It’s also been a wonderful bond with my parents. Dad and I dork out about camera lenses and mom tries to keep me from cursing at Adobe Lightroom too much.

As Garner would say, “Poker takes only a few minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master.” I believe photography is the same way. Get the right teacher and you learn quickly, and then you get to spend the rest of your life mastering it while exploring strange and wonderful places with strange and wonderful people!

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