“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard” – Anne Sexton (poet)

Every time I upgrade my camera I read nearly every page of the manual. By the time I’m done, there isn’t a feature I don’t know something about. 

Some of us know our camera manual better then our personal manual. In time we can adjust settings on our camera reflexively but are we reflexive to the settings of our own souls? We clean our camera sensor so it can effectively capture the light OUTSIDE and convert it into an IMAGE. We “clean” our internal sensors so we can capture the light WITHIN and convert it into ART. 

We did a little “cleaning” last week examining what can falsely motivate our photography, but we have a long way to go. Today let’s explore the goal.

Unveiled vision can be described in a number of ways. Hopefully a few of these resonate with you…

• Time touching eternity
• “Receiving” rather than “taking” photos
• The decisive moment you captured but (really) had nothing to do with 
• The work of art you don’t even remember creating 
• The client who feels so known/seen they text “what WAS that?” after a session
• Seeing the beauty on the other side of pain and ugly…the light that always lives above the clouds
• A long loving look at the real
• A stubborn refusal to be distracted by the virtual 
• Never allowing your art to define you
• Childlike wonder 
• A conviction that to soar to your greatest heights artistically, you have to plunge to your greatest depth. 

But we can’t just will our way there. We need to take steps like…

• Finding our why
• Embracing our story
• Making ourself small in the big picture 
• Making the work of others smaller in our own picture 
• A focus on the process not the product
• Seeing the ordinary as extraordinary 
• Treating our profession as a hobby 
• Embracing vulnerability and risk 
• Permitting our work to express the full range of human emotion
• Using our camera as an instrument of hope and healing
• Naming and engaging your Creative Source  
• Our “third eye”: awe 
• Wooing our wonder

These steps interweave and reinforce one another. In the posts ahead I’ll take different perspectives on them and hope you share your reflections with me!