mara solís has been shooting for nineteen years. she started on a nikon d70 her uncle left in a closet, moved through a predictable arc of upgrades, and then did something strange... she went back to shooting 35mm film for two years, on purpose, with a camera that cost forty dollars. she teaches workshops in new mexico now, mostly to people who arrive clutching their r5s and leave questioning everything. we asked her about the thing nobody in photography wants to say out loud: that gear is probably not your problem.
you teach a lot of photographers who are technically accomplished but creatively stuck. what does that actually look like when someone walks into your workshop?
they know their histogram. they can nail exposure in manual at a glance. they've got three lenses in a bag that cost more than my first car. and then i ask them to photograph a single chair in an empty room and they freeze. because there's no subject telling them what to do. no light that's obviously 'good.' nothing to react to technically. they've built this incredible machine for responding to situations... but they haven't developed the part that decides which situations matter. that's the gap. you can learn aperture in an afternoon. learning what you actually want to say with a photograph... that takes years of uncomfortable practice, and most people avoid it because it's not something you can buy your way into.
the gear conversation never ends online. what's your honest take on whether equipment matters?
it matters, and it matters a lot less than you think, and the order in which those two things are true depends entirely on where you are. if you're shooting events in low light with a ten-year-old crop sensor body, yes, upgrading will improve your work in specific, measurable ways. that's real. but most people upgrading aren't in that situation. they're shooting in decent light, with capable gear, and their images are flat because they haven't learned to see light yet... not because they need more megapixels. i shot some of my favorite images ever on a yashica t4 that i bought for sixty bucks at a flea market. and i've shot technically perfect frames on full-frame bodies that i never looked at again. the camera records what you point it at. pointing it somewhere interesting is still entirely your job.
what do you mean when you say someone hasn't learned to see light?
most beginners see subjects. they see a person, a mountain, a dog. they point the camera at the thing. but what a photograph actually records is light bouncing off a surface... so if you're only thinking about the subject, you're skipping the whole medium. seeing light means you walk into a room and your first instinct is not 'oh, interesting subject' but 'oh, that window is doing something to the left side of her face.' it means you notice that the hour before sunset wraps shadows differently than noon. it means you understand that overcast light is soft and directionless, and you either use that or you fight it. you can't learn this from a youtube video. you learn it by shooting the same scene in the same location at six different times of day and actually comparing what happened. most people never do that. they want the shot, not the education.
you went back to film for two years. what did that actually teach you that digital hadn't?
commitment. that's the whole answer, really. with digital you shoot forty frames of a moment and pick the best one later. with a thirty-six exposure roll, you think before you press the shutter. you ask yourself: is this actually worth a frame? and that question... that single question... changed how i look at everything. i started seeing more before i shot. i started waiting longer. i started walking around a scene for ten minutes before I touched the camera. and when i came back to digital, i kept that habit. i still ask whether the frame is worth it. i still wait. i still walk. i shot maybe eighty percent fewer frames and my keeper rate tripled. the film didn't do that. the constraint did. you could get the same lesson by limiting yourself to one memory card and not formatting it until the end of the month. most people won't, but you could.
what separates a photograph that someone screenshots and sends to a friend from one that gets a polite 'nice shot' and gets scrolled past?
specificity. always specificity. the images that stop people have one thing in them that could not have been photographed by anyone else, anywhere else, in any other moment. it's a specific quality of light, or a specific emotional register on someone's face, or a specific relationship between two elements in the frame that is quietly strange or quietly true. generic beautiful is everywhere. sunsets are everywhere. smiling portraits are everywhere. what people respond to is the feeling that somebody saw something real and had the presence of mind to hold still and capture it. that requires two things working together: the technical ability to not fumble the shot when the moment arrives, and the creative awareness to recognize the moment in the first place. one without the other gives you either blurry magic or sharp mediocrity.
do you think photographers underestimate how much editing shapes their work?
absolutely. and i say this as someone who spent years being a purist about it. the edit is part of the photograph. ansel adams spent more time in the darkroom than he did in the field, and he was explicit that the negative was the score and the print was the performance. if you're shooting raw and handing files to lightroom's auto-develop and calling it done, you are leaving the most expressive part of the process on the table. that said... and this is important... editing cannot rescue a bad capture. you cannot add light that wasn't there. you cannot fix a moment you were too slow to catch. so the hierarchy is: see it, capture it, then shape it. not: capture something okay and fix it later. post-processing is a creative tool, not a rescue operation. the people who treat it as a rescue operation will always be chasing the shot they didn't actually get.
last one. what's the thing you wish someone had told you nineteen years ago?
that the greats you're looking at online... the viral shots, the portfolio pieces, the award winners... those are the best one hundred images out of one hundred thousand attempts. probably more. you are comparing your complete archive, including every blurry mess and missed moment, to someone else's curated highlight reel. that comparison will destroy you if you let it. shoot more than you think you need to. stay out longer than feels comfortable. make bad photographs without shame, because the only way through bad is through. your eye is not built in a camera store. it's built in the field, over years, frame by frame, in the dark and the cold and the light that only showed up for forty seconds and you almost missed it. that's the work. there's no shortcut that doesn't eventually bring you back here.