Looking and Seeing: Section Seven: Assignment: Dot in Space continued

I find I often don’t get far if I start synchronizing as soon as I walk out the door.

By synchronizing I refer to the process of calming the mind, of letting thought settle and inviting an awareness of presence - the ambient temperature, the wind, the smell and sound of the environment, the weight of my body, the placement of the limbs, the rhythm of the breath. I do this in preparation for and immediately prior to shooting in whatever environment I happen to find myself.

This weekend I was shooting my neighborhood and had the intention of visiting a far corner that I don’t often get to.  But following synchronization, I find my pace slows considerably - as I intend.  And then I never get any further than a couple of blocks from my starting point because there is so much interesting detail nearby.

My solution was to walk deliberately to that far corner without my camera to hand and do my synchronization there, rather than right outside the door.  I thought of my walk as driving to my destination and that turned out to be a workable solution.

I was shooting the last assignment for Dot in Space and honestly I didn’t think much about capturing the halo-radiating presence of objects.  That didn’t come back to me until I had already finished shooting.

This then concludes my assignments for Looking and Seeing.  I will post a book review in the next couple of days before leaving for Japan, where I will be traveling, meditating, and shooting (probably to excess) for the next six weeks.

I’m currently reading Hoffman’s Photography as Meditation and will likely finish this on the road. This is a good book for light dipping as each “chapter” is only a couple of pages.

The next text in this Nilanda Miksang series won’t be ready until fall, so when I get back, I may follow up with Michael Wood’s Opening the Good Eye: A Path to True Seeing, or  Julie DuBose’s Effortless Beauty.

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