Foundation Skills Course – Week 8 Letting the photo come to you

The final week of our Foundations Skills in Mindful Photography Course finally arrived. This week we recapped on all we had covered: What Mindfulness is; What Mindful Photography is, Clear Seeing, The Four Stage Seeing Practice, Compositional Skills and Abstract Photography.

When I say recap, I actually mean an incentive flavoured Q&A. Where the incentive was chocolate for every right answer. What’s not to like? Then, after softening everybody up, I provided them with their final Mindful Photography Practice. A deceptively difficult one.

Over the next 50 minutes they had to create just one photo that illustrated how they felt today. This practice is called Letting the Photo come to you, and invites the photographers not to look for a photo, but wait for something to suggest itself. In this task they had the opportunity to bring all the foundation skills learnt to the challenge, particularly remaining present with the the task and how it made them feel. Other limitations during the practice included no looking at the final photo and no deleting.

All of this was designed to slow down the experience and attune them to their practice. Mindful Photography in action. Here are their photos.