SeeingFresh, Week 1: Color

I'm finding myself drawn back to Contemplative Photography or Miksang ("good eye"). (Perhaps because my meditation practice has been sluggish recently.) I first self-studied Miksang through "osmosis" in the summer of 2008, while volunteering at Karme Choling in Barnet, VT.

The excellent site www.seeingfresh.com has guidelines for teaching yourself Contemplative Photography. It emphasizes five concepts: color, texture, simplicity, light, and space.

My goal is to complete one lesson per week, both by shooting new images and by sifting though my photo archives for pix that meet each lesson's criteria. I will be uploading three photos per week to the SeeingFresh.com site, corresponding to each assignment.

The first week's assignment was "Color" and how it "has no meaning, apart from what thinking-mind superimposes on it."

Here's what I came up with:









After the files were submitted, the Contemplative Photography teachers will be reviewing them for compliance with the assignment and perhaps posting them to their site.

Stay tuned....

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UPDATE:

The second and third image were selected for posting to the site.

I got no feedback about the image which was not posted, but I thought hard about what could be improved for future submissions. The photo has interesting texture and composition and is "correct" within a traditional, technical context. However, it doesn't work as well within a contemplative photography context because it's hard to separate plants from their "greenness." In fact, while shooting the image, I thought, "Here's an interesting green plant," not "Wow! Green!"

Next week's assignment is texture, and I'll push harder to select images where my first instinct is "Wow! Texture!"

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