Annie Griffiths Belt was born to a mother who wasn’t discouraged by the word ‘No.’ Denied a position as a flight attendant because she wore glasses, Belt’s mother became a pilot instead. With her mother’s inspiration, Belt has never let the word ‘No’ stop her either. She has used her camera and her persuasive abilities to slip into the most closed cultures on the planet and in doing so, tapped into a life of adventure and education experienced by only the most talented photojournalists.

“I am living proof that when plans go awry, wonderful things can happen,” she writes in the opening sentence of her new retrospective, “A Camera, Two Kids and a Camel.” Understanding imperfection has helped her become a successful veteran photographer for National Geographic Magazine. She kicks off her book with these lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”

Belt describes her early years as a fort-building, mud-ball-tossing Midwestern tomboy who eventually landed a job as a photographer at a Wisconsin daily in the heart of farm country. She owes her career to an aligning of events consisting of a hailstorm, crop damage and a phone call from hard-ass National Georgraphic photography director Bob Gilka, who at the time was in need of a good picture for a book on natural disasters. A year later, in 1978, she became the youngest photographer at the Geographic.

In 224 pages containing black and white photographs and five essays, Belt takes us on a 30-year photographic journey. She mines her memory and heart as well as her photographs for the book’s back-story. With contagious Minnesotan optimism and enthusiasm for living, she describes her steady pursuit of light, which has inspired her to spring out of bed wearing only her underwear to capture fiery early morning skies. As her life progressed, she developed into a wise mother, which led her to create meaningful photographs for organizations like Habitat for humanity, the Church World Service.

Even more interesting than her photographic career is the family-first way she and her husband, Don, a National Geographic writer, have pursued their dreams. Learning by watching colleagues whose marriages ended in divorce, Annie and Don chose to pack up the family and take the show on the road while working many months at a time in foreign countries on assignments. She has met young women over the years who have asked, ‘Can I really become a globe-trotting photographer and manage to have a family?’ In some ways, Annie says her motivation for the book was to “lay down the bones to show that it’s possible as long as there is balance.”

In a recent phone interview, she described her child-rearing strategy this way: “The goal was to make their life interesting and fun, peaceful and stress-free.” First she had to get her children, Lilly and Charlie, interested in the concept of travel. Having her kids along tended to provide connective tissue in cultures where she had little in common with the subjects of her photographs. Doors opened and intimate pictures became possible because as a mother, she became real to her subjects. As a byproduct of their unique lifestyle, Charlie and Lilly became fluent in other languages, a unique edge in the modern world.

Annie’s personal descriptions of precious moments raise goose bumps, and the hellish logistical feats she has overcome to make her pictures give us a taste of life as a National Geographic photographer. Her images tend to be stylistically representative of those we’ve seen framed by the yellow NG rectangle, loaded with color and stopping power. The portfolio becomes more pleasing when the tales of how the work came to be are revealed in her vivid recollections.

“Every once in a while when you’re pushing the shutter, you say, ‘Wow, this is good’,” Annie laughs as she recalls making the remarkable photograph of a Zambian man standing in a low-water swimming hole several feet from spilling over the edge of Victoria Falls.

Belt’s dedication to her work will likely inspire readers to pick up a camera and a loved one or two, and head out for time together, and they’re lucky, find some imperfection.