The Journal

TThe moment had arrived. After three months of YouTube tutorials and trying to learn everything I could about photography from a screen, I was actually in Yosemite. I spent that first day with Adam taking it all in — putting my first real camera and first real lens to use, feeling in awe of what my eyes were seeing, flooded with excitement every time I pressed the shutter and made the memory permanent.

After our first afternoon of shooting we rushed back to the lodge to see what we'd captured. I turned on the camera, opened the first shot — and disaster. Every single shot was out of focus. I was heartbroken, annoyed, completely confused. I asked Adam, who was already an advanced photographer, to help me figure out what on earth had gone wrong. I don't remember what he fixed exactly — it was a very, very amateur mistake on my end — but my pity party finally ended because he figured it out. Tack-sharp shots from here on. Fingers crossed.

After that afternoon's debacle we had dinner, had a beer, and headed out to shoot stars from Tunnel View. For a guy who couldn't even get one shot in focus in the first few hours at Yosemite, my confidence that astrophotography was in my cards was not high. Trial and error is the name of the game. There were trials at Tunnel View. There were errors. And then the moment that changed everything. A car came through the valley with its headlights bright. I looked up at the clear sky, dialed in the settings I finally felt wouldn't overexpose or underexpose, and pressed the shutter. Thirteen seconds. The image popped up on the camera screen. A moment of disbelief — then I yelled out to Adam.

It was like I'd performed some sort of magic trick. What I was looking at seemed impossible to conceive. I shudder at how terrible those early photos look to me now — but at the time it was the most beautiful shot in the world. And that shot was the origin of an obsession that has changed my life for the better.