20-Shot Assignment: Parking Meter

Like practicing Buddhists everywhere, the complaint of boredom leads to calls to investigate the condition of boredom.

“Boredom is merely a symptom that you haven’t open your eyes wide enough."


“If you can relax fully into the present moment and keep a strong intention toward seeing color, there is no limit to what you can see.  It is endless.  You could explore color or texture or light for the rest of your life and never see all of it, never exhaust the intricacies and depths of the world of form.  With an open, restful, still mind, there is no end to see, no limit.

“When you become bored with the simplicity of form [we’re actually still on color], it means you are still on the outside looking in - separate from the objects of perception.  This might be because you are photographing for an audience, ....[always] evaluating what you see with your audience in mind...  These opinions close you off from the world of direct perception.”

The authors offer an exercise to demonstrate how a mundane subject can be explored in great depth and detail.  This is the 20-Shot Assignment.  A list of objects are provided from which one should choose:

Dumpster
Car
Sidewalk
Parking meter
Fire hydrant
Garage wall
Kitchen sink

 The call is to first spend time looking at it carefully from all available sides and angles, noting color, texture, lines, shapes, light.  Think not about taking photographs.  Just look intently for 15 minutes.  Then pick up the camera and, keeping the three stages of the practice in mind, begin shooting.  Make it point not to shoot what you’ve already seen and not use special lenses or setting to make massively tight closeups.  The idea is to photograph what you see in the context in which you see, which a macro cannot do.  Shoot 20 images, relax, then shoot one more.

The point, they say, is not to produce brilliant images, but to convince yourself that these is much to see.

In this I can concur.  I ventured out yesterday and found a parking meter on which to lavish my attention.  I spent perhaps five minutes looking before shooting, not the recommended fifteen.  Perhaps if there had been somewhere to sit I might have looked longer.  I then began to shoot and stayed with it for about fifteen minutes.

Some shots fit the prescribed method of attend-see-capture.  Others were made by looking through the lens to see what the camera presented.  I wonder what teachers might say about this?  Is it somehow dishonest to see through the lens?

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