Beginners Mind: What I Learned from My Worst Photos
The photo that was published in the local paper in 2012
Selfies at Yosemite
I got my first ‘real’ camera in 2013—a $300 Nikon D3200, my first camera that wasn’t a phone. A local newspaper had just published a photo I took of a sunset at Lake Tahoe, and naturally, I thought I was a professional. I took my camera everywhere, convinced I was on the verge of something big. A rising star in the photography world, surely, it was only a matter of time before National Geographic called.
Not long after, while grocery shopping at Safeway with my roommates, my friend David asked me about my newfound passion. “So, you know what the rule of thirds is?” he asked.
“Of course,” I replied smugly. (Did David forget I had just been published in a small Indiana newspaper?)
“What is it?” he prodded.
“I… I don’t know.”
Standing in the grocery store aisle, holding a box of cereal, I realized that I wasn’t the expert I thought I was—I was a beginner. And instead of feeling discouraged, I felt free. If I didn’t have to be great, I could just focus on enjoying the process. And for the next two years, that’s exactly what I did.
I was living at Lake Tahoe, the perfect place to be a beginner photographer. Nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains, it’s the largest and second-deepest alpine lake in the United States. The water is stunningly clear, with an average visibility of 70 feet below the surface. Friends told me it was impossible to take a bad picture there. Challenge accepted.
In those first months, I made every mistake imaginable—bad lighting, weird compositions, horizon lines so tilted they looked like ski slopes. But I didn’t care. I was having too much fun.
Eventually, I started recognizing patterns. My workflow became more comfortable. My photos went from Why does this exist? to Hey, that’s not bad! I wouldn’t say I was getting better, but slowly, I was getting slightly less bad.
With this progress came confidence, and I started to experiment. Once I let go of the pressure to be good, I tried things just to see what would happen. I remember waking up at 3 a.m., trekking down to the docks under a new moon to take long-exposure photos of the lake. They turned out great! Nice! But the time-lapse I tried to take of the sunrise? A disaster. It captured something, but it definitely wasn’t a sunrise.
The docks at 3 a.m.
I’m improving!
Here's where things shift. Over time, my photos improved. People started complimenting them, asking for prints, and even suggesting I take photography more seriously. While that should have felt good, something else began to creep in—expectation.
At first, the recognition felt validating. Finally, my talent is being recognized! Not long after that, though, the validation began to feel like something else – pressure. I started second-guessing shots. I took less risks. Before I clicked the shutter, I found myself asking will people like this?
I caught myself standing in front of beautiful scenes—camera in hand, perfect light—feeling… nothing. I missed how I felt when I first started—when every photo was an experiment, when mistakes were part of the fun, and when I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I missed being a beginner.
The strange thing about getting better at something is that it doesn’t always make it more enjoyable. In the beginning, every photo felt like an adventure—each one a surprise, sometimes a happy accident, sometimes a total mess. But once I knew what I was doing, I started expecting more from myself. And somewhere along the way, that sense of freedom faded.
Flash forward to 10 years later. My photos have been published in magazines and used in marketing campaigns by tourism boards across the country, and Hawaii Magazine named me one of the island’s best adventure photographers. (I lived in Hawaii for three years; crazy, right?). By all accounts, I was doing it; I was a photographer!
A few weeks ago, I ran out of space on my hard drive and had to transfer everything onto a new one. It was supposed to be a mindless task—dragging and dropping files and clearing up space. But somewhere in the chaos of folders labeled Final_FINAL_v3 and Sort Through Later, I found something I hadn’t seen in years.
My old Lake Tahoe photos.
I couldn’t believe it. I clicked through and felt waves of emotions come over me; I laughed, I cringed, and I felt *nostalgic*. But most of all, I remembered how much fun I had taking those images. I remembered the fearless and playful version of myself—the me who wasn’t afraid to experiment. I felt admiration for the less technically skilled version of me.
Curiosity got the best of me. I imported the old files to Lightroom (shoutout to younger me for shooting in RAW) and began to edit. A decade of experience made the process feel effortless – like second nature. I sat there adjusting the exposure, refining the colors, and pulling out details I hadn’t even noticed back then. And to my surprise, the photo was… good. Not just passable, actually good.
It wasn’t perfect, of course—the composition was a little off, the focus not as sharp as I’d like—but there was something else in it. Something intangible and unexplainable.
I sat there staring at the screen, and it hit me. I didn’t just admire beginner me—I wanted to be beginner me. Not in skill, but in spirit. Because technical mastery means nothing if you lose the curiosity that got you there in the first place.
