Edit 3: Through A New Lens
You can take this to be both figurative and literal.
Photography has always been a passion of mine-not merely a hobby. A hobby suggests something you dabble in, something you pick up and set down casually. My affinity has never been that. I’ve chased it across countries and time zones with my iPhone, the “good” camera, lens caps rolling around in purses and backpacks, crossbody straps imprinting my shoulder, and equipment borrowed and returned like heirlooms. My back has been strengthened by it-sometimes unwillingly, always faithfully.
Ask me again why I enjoy my nightly baths.
Learning photography has felt like playing one of my favorite games-mahjong. A little skill, a little luck, plenty of strategy, and a willingness to lose often before anything resembling mastery shows up. There have been beautiful wins-glorious shots that came out of nowhere-and truly frustrating losses. But growth never showed up in the pretty places. It came in the irksome ones-the blurry frames, the missed focus, the handful of images out of hundreds that really landed.
(In those moments, I seriously considered throwing my camera. I didn’t. But I really, really thought about it.)
Like many of my favorite photographers, I’ve taught myself what I know, and when I look back at where I started compared to now, I see the full spectrum: the laughter, the quiet victories, the cringe-worthy editing phases, and the deeply satisfying surprises. Some images still stop me cold in the very best way-they remind me that art evolves right alongside the artist.
The Blue Ridge Mountains after an autumn storm
I’ve never truly regretted taking a picture. Even the worst ones belonged to something-a moment, an effort, a tenderness, a willingness to try. What I have regretted are some of the edits. The wild saturation. The glowing highlights. The questionable attempts to erase people, trash cans, electrical lines-proof that at one time, I was doing the absolute most.
Thankfully, you can teach an old girl new tricks. And this one learned a great one: to edit-not erase.
That shift changed everything.
Images don’t have to be perfect to matter. They don’t need to be flawless to be worth keeping. And neither do we.
Life, Edited is about learning that lesson over and over again: how to clarify without deleting, how to refine without removing history, how to honor who we were while adjusting who we’re becoming. We get better at seeing-our surroundings, our gifts, our people, ourselves. And we get better at shaping.
Not with drastic cuts, but with thoughtful edits. And so-as life does-it rewarded the long nights of tinkering, the bad edits, the shoulder indentations, the retries, and the quiet persistence.
Because this week, I received my first paid photography job.
Not a favor.
Not a trade.
An actual paid job.
And that felt like a moment worth writing into permanence.
So this is my first serious life edit-a small celebration captured not in pixels, but in progress. It’s a reminder that the good things take time when they grow quietly, and then suddenly, can bloom.
