As photographers, I believe it’s important to recognize the profound connection between our eyes, mind, physical body, and the intuitive link that ties all our senses together—engaging with visual sights, the sounds, the smells, and the tactile feeling of moving our feet on the street.
As a photographer, I am not only responsible for positioning my body on the frontlines of life, engaged in embodied reality through the physical act of making photographs, but I must be aligned physically, mentally, and spiritually.
ZOOM OUT
One fun exercise I like to do is shifting my perspective through a mental game that reminds me how profound the power of our perception is.
- Listen to your heart beating
- Visualize the blood rushing through your arteries
- Imagine the cells within your body
- Zoom into the strands of DNA that make up the nucleus of the cells
- Now zoom out, imagine your physical body wherever you may be, from a third person POV
- Soar like an eagle in flight, and view yourself from the clouds in the sky
- Now go beyond the horizon, to the moon, and view the earth from the distance
- Travel to the sun, the stars, and view the milky way galaxy
- Think about how many galaxies there are, and how we are this extremely tiny speck in the universe in the grand scheme of things
- Finally come back down to earth, into your body, and hold your hands in front of your two eyes
Welcome to the video game we can life
Each day is new, each day is different
Now go out into the world as a child would, and treat each day like its the first day of your life.
One practice I engage with each day is by treating every night before I rest my head to sleep, like a miniature death. When I wake up in the morning, I treat it like a miniature birth. From there, I start my day through gratitude for simply being alive, and go onwards into the unknown with abundance.
Enter the flow state
When you approach the streets each day, go slow, and just let life flow towards you. Stop hunting, and start listening, feeling, and responding to life through your intuition.
Photograph though your intuition, not your vision.