Summer and Slow Photography

Once photography was no longer my daily business, I slowly began to use it as a way to find myself again.  When my cameras were my "work tools" I found I wanted a break from them when I wasn't working and so I found that I only made photographs for myself when I was away from my daily life.

Now I often find myself content to sit watching something with my camera on my lap waiting for the intuitive connection between my subject and myself.  But I wasn't always able to allow myself to slow down and do this.

To get to this place of "slow photography" I suggest in the Exploration on page 134 of The Creative Photographer that you:

"put on music that speaks to you, perhaps something without words to distract you and loud enough to drown out any other noises.  Then, take your camera and sit in front of an object you have decided you want to photograph.  Take a photograph of this object every five minutes for an hour (a total of 12 images).  In between, just look at the object, contemplate it, and listen to the music."

Doesn't that sound like a perfect way to spend a summer day?

In addition I suggest you "think about where the object came from, how many hands it passed through to get to you, whether it has been touched by the sun or the earth, by ocean, river or stream.  Think about its symbolic meaning ..."

After all, as Jan Phillips so eloquently reminds us: "We photographers are poets in the language of symbols."

(And if you want to know what the Buddha is holding, it is a stone with the words "Embrace Love" stamped on the stone)