About

About this course

Contemplative Photography is a free, week-by-week course in seeing. It follows the first-level Miksang curriculum and draws on other teachers who use the camera the same way, from Minor White to Thomas Merton.

It’s an independent study guide with no connection to any school. For teachers and workshops, see Nalanda Miksang.

How to use it

Each week is 1 page of slides, with 1 idea and 1 photograph per screen. Step through with the Next button, the arrow keys or a swipe, and tap the slide counter to jump to any slide.

Read a week on a quiet evening, then spend the rest of the week practicing it. New weeks are added as they’re written, and The path shows which ones are ready.

The photographs

The sample photographs come from Flickr photographers who share their work under Creative Commons licenses. Each one is credited under the picture and on the photo credits page, with a link to its license.

Most of those licenses are non-commercial, so this site is too. It has no ads, nothing for sale and no sign-up.

Quotations

Quotations from other authors are word for word and appear in quotation marks. Passages marked “Paraphrase” restate an author’s idea in plain words.

Julie DuBose’s Effortless Beauty is drawn from its Chinese edition, so those passages are marked as translated or paraphrased and may differ from her original English. The full list is on the sources page.