04/09/2026
I Was Never Just Taking Pictures
For years, I thought I was building a photography career.
And to be fair—I did. It worked. It grew. It paid bills and put me in rooms I never imagined I’d be in. I traveled, I taught, I stood on stages in places like Las Vegas trying to explain what I was doing behind the camera like it was some kind of formula people could replicate.
And they tried.
They wanted to know the lens, the settings, the lighting, the editing… like if they could just get the right combination of tools, they could produce the same result.
And I’d stand there thinking—how do I explain that it’s not the camera?
Because it never was.
What I was actually doing had very little to do with a tool in my hand and everything to do with how I was seeing.
Before every single session, I prayed the same prayer.
“God, give me Your eyes for this person. Let me see them the way You see them.”
Every time.
Because I knew something walking into those sessions—people don’t show up as themselves. They show up as who life has convinced them they are. A little guarded. A little unsure. Carrying stories, insecurities, labels… sometimes full-blown lies they’ve believed for years.
And my job wasn’t to pose them.
My job was to look long enough—steady enough—until something real started to surface.
Until they softened.
Until they forgot to perform.
Until, for just a second, they looked like who they actually were.
And when I caught that moment? That was the image.
Not perfection. Not production.
Recognition.
And here’s the part I don’t think I ever said out loud enough—
I didn’t want the prettiest girl in the class to be my “senior influencer.”
I wanted the one who had been overlooked.
The one who didn’t feel pretty.
The one who sat a little quieter, second-guessed herself a little more, didn’t expect to be chosen.
Because I knew if I could show her what I saw—if I could hand her back a version of herself that looked confident, radiant, undeniable—everything would change.
Not just for her… but for everyone watching.
Because confidence is contagious when it’s real.
And isn’t that exactly what Jesus does?
He doesn’t walk into a room and pick the most obvious person.
He goes straight for the overlooked. The dismissed. The ones the world already made up its mind about.
And He says, without hesitation—
Look at you.
You’re mine.
You were created in My image.
I didn’t have the full language for that back then… but I was living it.
I remember teaching in Vegas once, and someone said, “I had no idea people in West Virginia were so beautiful. I thought they were all overweight and had no teeth.”
Which is… bold. Incorrect. But bold.
And instead of arguing, I just pointed to the work.
Because that’s what I had always been doing—pointing.
Pointing to people and saying, without saying it, look again.
Look past what you assumed.
Look past what they’ve believed about themselves.
Look past what the world has reduced them to.
There’s more here.
There’s always more here.
And if I’m being real—and I am—yes, that work pointed back to me too. It built a name. A reputation. A career. People saw the images and thought, she’s talented.
And I let them.
Because I didn’t fully understand yet what I was actually participating in.
I thought I was capturing beauty.
I didn’t realize I was responding to the One who created it.
And now here I am, walking into the Catholic Church, and it’s like… oh.
This again.
But bigger.
Deeper.
Unmistakable.
Because the Church doesn’t just talk about truth—it shows it. In stone, in light, in incense, in posture, in silence that somehow says more than noise ever could. The architecture, the liturgy, the rhythm of it all—it’s not decoration. It’s revelation.
And something in me immediately recognized it.
Of course it did.
I’ve been drawn to beauty my whole life.
Not surface-level pretty. Not curated perfection. I’m talking about the kind of beauty that feels anchored. The kind that makes you pause without knowing why. The kind that doesn’t beg for attention but somehow holds it anyway.
The kind that points beyond itself.
Because when I look back, I can see it clearly now—I was never the source of what I was capturing.
I was looking for it.
Responding to it.
Trying to show people what I was seeing, even when they couldn’t see it themselves.
And if I trace that all the way back, it leads to one place.
God.
The Creator of beauty.
The One who formed a garden before He ever gave a command.
The One who didn’t introduce Himself through arguments… but through something breathtaking.
So no, I’m not picking up sessions again.
At least not yet.
I’m not trying to rebuild what was.
This feels different.
Quieter.
More intentional.
Less about producing and more about witnessing.
I want to capture the beauty of the faith as it exists in my actual life. Not staged. Not overthought. Just… noticed.
A candle lit on a random day because it reminds me to slow down.
Light hitting a statue in a way that makes you stop for a second.
A moment before Mass where everything feels still and holy and you don’t even have words for it.
Not “look at me.”
Not even “look what I made.”
Just a steady, quiet…
look at Him.
Because that’s what I’ve been trying to do all along.
I just know it now.
And somehow… that makes everything feel a little more aligned, a little more honest, and a lot less like I have something to prove.
Turns out, I was never just taking pictures.
I was learning how to see.
You can read more over on my Substack. I’ll drop a link in the comments.
