Through and From The Lens –Transforming the “I Can’t”s / “You Can’t”s to “I Can”s –
Using Your Camera to assist you in making the difference
Sheila Reflected Twice in a Camera lens
I have just relaunched my Through and From the Lens Photo / Seeing course with the first session in January. The name does not make sense to most people, so why would I use it? Mainly because I have yet to come up with another name that describes the course.
It is in the looking “through” the lens of, in this case, the camera and seeing what comes “from” it that gives us a new understanding of happenings in our lives. For the most part how we see and interpret what’s going on comes from past-based, often limiting, conversations. Many of them exist in our head, often running the decisions we make, or, perhaps more importantly, don’t make.  Keep in mind that we are always looking at ourselves, others and situations in our life through one kind of “lens” or another. It is how we focus.
In the Through and From the Lens (TFTL) course where we use the camera to experience focus, and much more, we start becoming far more aware of how we see and what’s important to us. By paying attention to what catches our eyes and our attention, then “capturing” it with the camera, we start gaining new awareness and understanding of what’s important to us.
In setting intentions for the week, such as finding a particular color, we experience the power of things “showing up” when intentions are set. With practice this becomes a part of our lives, far beyond using the camera, as we apply it to every day situations.
To sum up, it’s the after effects of taking what comes “From the Lens” into our lives that adds so much to what we’ve seen “Through” it. All that is experienced in the focusing helps move us from the “I Can’t”s we might be feeding ourselves to forward-moving actions in other areas of our lives. This includes, for many, shifting the “I’m not creative” and/or “I can’t take good pictures” conversations.
More to follow in subsequent posts, including shifts experienced by past participants.
Note: The lead photo is an example of photographing something that caught my attention. I was walking on the boardwalk of Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Florida, when I happened to glance into the lens of a large camera and saw my reflection(s) in it.
At the moment the photographer simply had her camera positioned on a tripod. Given I would not be interfering, I immediately raised my camera to my eye and took several photographs of what I saw. The lens became the image, which as I now write, is in the header for this course.
Looking in the Camera
I did finally ask the photographer to pose behind the camera, as shown above, mainly to show the size of the camera.