Week 00: Learning to see

Background

A camera for training attention

Contemplative photography uses the camera to train your attention.

Its best-known form is Miksang, Tibetan for “good eye.” Michael Wood and John McQuade built it into a curriculum in the 1980s, and today it’s taught by Nalanda Miksang (McQuade and Miriam Hall) and the Miksang Institute (Wood, Julie DuBose and Andy Karr).

Background

Things, and how they look

Most of the time we see things. A cup, a wall, a car. We see just enough to name each one and move on.

Underneath is how those things actually look: the glaze on the cup, a patch of light on the wall, the exact red of the car. It’s always there, and most days we walk straight past it.

Background

Noticing and seeing

Karr and Wood call these two ways of looking noticing and seeing.

Noticing works in labels, so a traffic signal registers as “red light, stop.” Seeing takes in the saturated red, the facets of the lens and the glow on the housing.

You see first, and the label arrives a split second later. Most of us spend the day in the labels.

Why it matters

Let the world go first

Strong pictures come from strong perceptions. Most photography starts with an idea (“that would make a nice shot”) and then builds a picture of the idea.

Contemplative photography turns that around. You wait for something to stop you, then make an equivalent of what you saw. Alfred Stieglitz came up with the word for his cloud photographs.

Other voices

“Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards, never while actually taking a photograph.”

Why it matters

A few degrees

You don’t need a special location or a better camera for any of this.

McQuade calls it a shift of “a few degrees,” meaning a small change in where you point your attention, kept up for a long time.

The 3 stages · 1

The flash of perception

Something stops you before you’ve had a thought about it. It might be a color, a shine or a shape.

It feels sudden, like a small gap in your usual stream of thinking. You can’t make it happen, but practice makes it happen more often.

The 3 stages · 2

Visual discernment

Keep the camera down for now and stay with whatever stopped you (stand still, too).

Ask yourself “What stopped me?” and look for the answer with your eyes. Is it the color, the texture or the light? Where does it start and stop, and is it vertical or horizontal?

Karr and Wood call this “putting in the clutch,” like when you stop pedalling a bike and coast.

The 3 stages · 3

Forming the equivalent

Now raise the camera. Frame what you saw with “nothing added, nothing missing.”

Karr and Wood call this framing. Composition means arranging things to improve the picture, and here you’re only reporting what you saw.

The 3 stages

Looking, then seeing

Nalanda Miksang describes the same steps as looking and seeing.

Looking is the moment your eye stops on “that.” Seeing comes next, when you take in what it looks like: this particular red, how warm it is, what sits beside it.

Both schools make the picture from that second step.

3 things that help

Intent, synchronization and stillness

• Intent means pointing yourself toward seeing, lightly. Trying hard gets in the way, so Karr and Wood borrow a violinist’s rule for tuning a string: “not too tight, not too loose.”
• Synchronization means your eye, your mind and the world are in the same place at the same time. It comes slowly, through walking, listening and looking around with no goal.
• Stillness sits under both. When thoughts creep in, come back to stillness before you look again.

Other voices

Coming back to stillness is like pressing a refresh button: again and again we restore balance and openness, so the experience stays true. Nothing needs adding that isn’t there. We simply receive what is in front of us.

Exercise 1 of 5

Get your camera ready

The night before, charge the battery, clean the lens and empty the card.

The contemplative arts treat their tools with respect, the way a calligrapher looks after a brush. It also leaves you with no excuses in the morning.

Exercise 2 of 5 · 5 minutes, no camera

Visual field awareness

Look straight ahead. Keep your eyes still and move your attention to the top of what you can see, then to the right, the bottom and the left.

Then take in the whole view at once.

This is also the quickest way to calm down in the middle of a shoot.

Exercise 3 of 5 · 15 minutes, no camera

The perceptual gaze

Sit with an ordinary object, like a dining chair. What does your eye pick up before the word “chair” arrives? Look for shapes, gradients, a shine on one edge and a color that shifts in the shadow.

Then try something busier, like a glass of ice water on a sunny table.

Exercise 4 of 5 · 20 minutes, camera down

The synchronization walk

Take a walk somewhere ordinary with no headphones and the phone in your pocket.

For the first 10 minutes, pay attention to another sense, like your footsteps or the sounds around you. Then start noticing color here and there.

Give the dull stuff a look too: pavement, a drain, a plain wall.

Exercise 5 of 5

The human camera

Find a big, safe, open space. Close your eyes and turn slowly until you lose your bearings, then open your eyes for a moment like a shutter and close them again. Speed up until the labels can’t keep up.

Then open your eyes, keep them open and walk to whatever caught you first. Fill the frame with exactly that, and repeat 5 or 6 times.

Filling the frame

Walk over

A flash is specific. If you shoot from where you were standing when it hit you, the frame fills up with stuff that wasn’t part of it.

McQuade’s example is a parking lot, where you flash on the corner of a red sign on a white wall. Your picture is a red square in the corner of a white field, so you leave out the rest of the sign, the wall and the cars.

Filling the frame

Check the edges

• Go to where the perception is, then fill the frame with only that.
• Keep the camera parallel to the surface when you can. It steadies the picture and keeps stray things out.
• Before you press the shutter, check all 4 edges and get rid of anything that wasn’t part of the flash.
• Skip the tricks, like dramatic angles or underexposing for richer color. If you’re trying to improve it, you’ve started composing.

Other voices

Photography talks like a hunter: we take, shoot, aim and capture. Zehr points out that a camera only ever receives light, and he suggests treating each picture as a gift.

Other voices

Minor White asked his students to remember the taste of the first impression before they did anything else. Ulrich ties this to the Zen idea of no-mind, and to the line “first thought, best thought.”

Other voices

“It was there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”

A teaching story

Going blind

McQuade asks you to imagine losing your sight for good. On top of relearning daily life, you’d miss things you never knew you saw: the light changing through the day, the colors you walked past, the look in someone’s eyes.

He says sight is closer to a miracle than a fact, and most of us go through life half-blind. Keep that in mind on this week’s walk.

Checking in

How the week went

Camera settings

Settings for the whole course

Mode

Aperture priority at about f/8, with auto ISO and a sensible upper limit

Drive

Single shot. Turn off burst and pre-capture, so each perception gets 1 frame

Flash

Off, always

Frame

Check the edges in the viewfinder or on the screen

Phone

Fine to start with. Lock focus and exposure on what stopped you, and turn off portrait and zoom effects

Where to shoot · Dallas & Frisco

Ordinary places

Anywhere ordinary near you will do, like an alley, a parking lot or a loading dock. Around Dallas and Frisco, try these:

• An empty parking lot early on a Sunday for the human camera. A church or office lot works well.
• Your own home for the perceptual gaze, and for window light in the late afternoon.
• Frisco Square on a weekday morning, when the plaza is quiet, for the synchronization walk.

Between shoots

10 seconds a day

Once a day, stop and ask yourself what your eyes are taking in right now, before any names arrive.