Foundation Skills Course – Week 1

This week was the first of my rebranded Mindful Photography Course. I’ve changed the name of the first 8 week course to ‘Foundation Skills’. The content is still the same and covers an introduction to Mindfulness, Mindful Photography and three key topics. The first is Clear Seeing – how you can improve your seeing and use seeing as your mindful anchor when creating photos. The second looks at Compositional Guidelines and the third is Mindful Attitudes – how mindful attitudes can be developed through photography. The course also includes Mindful Photography Practices to support the development of your skills and understanding.

The name change is designed to clearly reflect what the course covers. It provides you with the skills which you can then develop and use on the second course: Exploring Life. Together the two courses support people who have experienced significant loss or great change in their life to explore the question, “Who Am I Now?”

Week 1 is an introduction to Mindful Photography. I cover what mindfulness and meditation are and link this to an outline of what Mindful Photography is, particularly describing how photography can be used as a mindful practice. I also run over the other topics that we are going to cover on the course: Clear Seeing, Composition skills and Mindful Attitudes.

Slow Down

The first challenge I set our new group was to slow down their photography practice. The speed at which we can create and delete photographs digitally has led to a disconnect with the present moment. This contributes to our inability to see what is really there. Digital cameras can take hundreds of photos in minutes and we can easily discard the ones we don’t like. This leads to a belief that because we can take many photos one will be good and we then don’t pay attention, as well as we can, to what can be seen. Seeing is at the heart of photography and is our anchor in Mindful Photography.

All photography activities on the course are called practices. Each one can be completed more than once, each one is an invitation to practice being present with your camera. My initial practices on the course encourage you to slow down and really connect with what you can see. This intention is supported by turning a digital camera into something like a film camera.

You too can do this. All you need to do is to turn off your viewscreen – for viewing and review. If you can’t, or don’t know how to, you can just tape a small piece of card over the screen. Then you limit the number of photos you are allowed to take. For example you only allow yourself 10 photos, with deleting not allowed.

Not being able to see what you have created (and if you have no viewfinder you have to imagine what the camera is receiving) slows you right down. Each photo becomes more precious, and just counting to 10 becomes a challenge! If you would like to know more take a look at the post ’10 Tips to slow down your photography’

At the end of the practice – which we did for 45 mins, each photographer chose one favourite photo to share and discuss with the rest of the group. Here they are.