Spending time studying my family’s photographs and getting my feet wet in Appalachian Studies at Mars Hill University, I decided I wanted to learn photography so I could be a documentarian too. Walking into the campus MAC lab on day one, though, I knew I was going to be bored for a while. No class ever lets you jump into the deep end, even when you are salivating to sink your creative hands into the tools in front of you. You wade. You read the syllabus. You learn the parts of the camera like you are studying a manufacturer’s manual, and you try not to let your eyes glaze over while your whole body is screaming to get outside with that thing and just see what you can make.
I had the passion. I just did not have the patience. And for the first few weeks of that class, patience was all they were asking for.
The Triangle Nobody Warned Me About
After working through the anatomy of the camera for a few weeks, one afternoon my professor drew something on the board in red marker: the Exposure Triangle.
Aperture. Shutter speed. ISO.
He explained that changing one element meant the others had to shift too — a balancing act, like geometry. That part made sense to me. I understood balance.
Then he showed us the fractions.
My heart sank. Fractions had been my mortal enemy since elementary school. I was an English major through and through — devoted to reading, to language, to story. I had done well enough in math classes over the years, but fractions and I held a fragile truce at best, and they were firmly in enemy territory. In fact, I almost withdrew from the class that day.
The warmth of March sunlight filtered through the open window as I sat there weighing it: love of art versus the annoyance of numbers.
What kept me was a simple truth I had to remind myself of: I loved art, but I could not draw. And I wanted to document my life and others’.
Photography was it or nothing. So, I stayed, even when the numbers made little sense to me.
That fear left a mark. The weeks that followed, working through the exposure triangle one element at a time, tested me in ways I had not expected.
I grew unbelievably frustrated!
I wanted to create, not calculate. The only thread I held onto was the rhythm my professor had established: lesson on Monday, application mid-week, creative assignments due Friday. That sliver of expression was just enough to keep me in the room.
The Critique That Almost Ended Me
There was something else I despised about that class, and it was not the fractions. It was the weekly group critique.
Putting a room full of beginners in a circle and asking them to evaluate each other’s work before they even have the language for it is a gamble with fragile things. We were all stumped. Nobody knew what to say. And when people do not know what to say, they sometimes say the wrong thing — not out of cruelty, but out of uncertainty.
One Friday, I submitted a close-up of a charred tree stump with a new home blurred in the background. My professor picked up on it immediately. But when he called on a girl in the group to critique my work, she stared at it for a moment, shrugged, and said, “I don’t get it.”
I did not respond. I thought it was obvious — destruction framed against something new. My professor explained it to her. But that shrug, that small honest confession, set my confidence back for a long time. It made me question whether I could translate what I wanted to express through the viewfinder.
I believe many artists are never born because of a critique internalized too early, in the wrong setting, without the right foundation beneath them. What I would have preferred was a private critique followed by personal reflection. Let the students learn to examine their own work first. Let them find the verbal language of assessing art before it is handed to them by someone who is just as lost. Group critique can come later, once there is enough ground to stand on.
What They Should Have Taught First
Looking back, I wish that class had started with story. With artistic composition. With the concept of seeing — not calculating. For a student who does not yet know she is an artist, one still standing at the edge of that identity and not yet willing to claim it, starting with the technical is the fastest way to lose her.
We did not get to story and composition until month two. By then, some students had already checked out emotionally. I had nearly joined them.
The foundations did stay with me, buried somewhere under the frustration. They waited. And years later, when I finally returned to photography on my own terms, they were there.
I nearly made this same mistake years later when I began studying off-camera lighting. The first photographer I took a course from had come from an advanced film background and was all about the technical. Even after purchasing the course, I could not finish it. The passion was there. The entry point was not.
The Photographer Who Changed How I See: Brooke Shaden
It was when I discovered photographer Brooke Shaden that everything lit up at once, like a candle whose flame finally found the dark room it was made for.
I watched her lessons and noticed something immediately: when students asked for her exact settings, she pushed back. Gently but firmly. The settings do not matter, she would say. What matters is the vision of what you are creating. The settings change constantly because light is fleeting. What you are really learning is how to see.
"Find what you want to say -- what your core message is -- the thing you feel needs to be expressed before you die. Once you have an inkling of what that might be, create it. Create it over and over until it is clear."
She is right. You can chase perfect settings so relentlessly that you miss the shot entirely. Or worse, you never allow yourself to progress because you are still trying to memorize a formula instead of developing a vision.
What I had been missing all along — what the exposure triangle never told me — is that balancing those settings is not really math. It is a synthesis. It is learning to speak the machine’s language fluently enough that it gets out of the way of your vision.
Why Early Wins Matter More Than Perfect Settings
Part of learning photography is learning to see yourself as an artist. That is not a soft, secondary goal — it is the foundation. Without it, all the technical mastery in the world sits in an empty room collecting dust, another hobby we thought we would try and quietly walked away from.
What if we threw the old curriculum out the window and started with confidence instead? By teaching a student how to capture the story in front of them. By giving them an early win that makes them believe they belong behind the camera before we ever ask them to balance a triangle.
I think about the students who leave art classes and never come back. The ones who swallowed a critique at nineteen and decided it was not for them. The artists who were never born.
And yet there are others who do not need mastery at all. They simply want to document their lives, their children, the beautiful thing in front of them right now. Should not art be made teachable in more than one way? Should not the door swing open for those who never imagined they could walk through it?
At least, that is what I think. I am just a woman who almost quit over fractions and ended up making it her life’s work anyway.
