Mindfulness

Mindfulness:  "The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment to moment basis"  Merriam-Webster online dictionary www.merriam-webster.com.

Often, when we go into certain situations, we have preconceived notions or expectations about what we expect or want to happen.  In my article on meditation I stated that I often listen to music that contains the sounds of ocean waves, babbling brooks or even waterfalls and suggested that words to songs can "pollute my mind" and help me raise false expectations of what I want or expect to come away from a shoot with.

Susan Kanfer on the Photofocus website posted a picture of Zion National Park.  Given the same opportunity, many people would come away with just one picture from this opportunity, but Susan was able to discover five other pictures within the one picture that many of us would have taken.

In my previous post titled "A Christmas Walk At The Driskill Hotel, I talked of watching an inspirational video that gave me ideas of possible post processing ideas for pictures I wanted to take to accomplish my ideas.  When you go out shooting, it almost makes the shoot to be a sort of scavenger hunt for the opportunities that you seek and desire to accomplish the objectives you desire.

So what can we do to take pictures that show our heightened  or complete awareness of our thoughts, emotions or experiences that we are having when we take pictures?

First:  Walk slowly over your selected path.  Just as if you were looking for something that you might have lost, I often tell people, "Look up, look down and look from left to right, but look slowly."

Second:  Don't be so concerned with the total picture.  If you go to Google Search and search images of places that you would like to take pictures at, you can see plenty of those.  If you have Google Earth, you can literally see pictures that other people have taken of the places you want to go to.  What will make your pictures stand out is if you take selected images from that bigger picture.  Look for things such as water flowing over rocks, trees that are standing next to each other that perhaps have contrasting colors, perhaps green and yellow or red and either green or brown.  Don't be enchanted with a waterfall.  Again, there are plenty of pictures of those.  Instead look for the water cascading over what is causing the waterfall.  Perhaps you need to put your camera in a vertical position so that you can capture more of the falls.  Perhaps, you need a zoom lens on your camera and a tripod because you can't get close enough to that picture.  Many have suggested using a Neutral Density (ND) filter to make the water more milk like in appearance.  Also, try taking several pictures at a faster speed on your camera and then importing them into Photoshop as layers.  You will find that your vegetation is not blurry around your waterfall, especially if there was a wind, which often seems to happen.

Third:  Before you take your picture, think how you are going to process it.  I eluded to this about the waterfall.  How you are going to process your picture is very important to how you take it. Do you need just one picture or do you need several?  It is difficult to go back and try to take the same picture, especially if the place you took the picture is a long distance from you.  Besides that, the light is never the same because of the rotation of the Earth.  Remember the old phrase, "Better safe than sorry"?  It applies to photography as well.  It is far better to take more pictures and then discard the ones that you don't want to use when you post process than to go back and retake your picture again.

Fourth:  If something makes you happy, take a picture of it.  Life is filled with sorrowful moments. During those sorrowful moments it is often best to go back and reflect on those positive happy moments in your life.  You will find it puts a smile on your face.

There is a quote associated with Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Clemons), "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness".  He went on to say, "And many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one's lifetime.

Happy shooting.