Zen Camera

Zen Camera is an unprecedented photography practice that guides you to the creativity at your fingertips, calling for nothing more than your vision and any camera, even the one embedded in your phone. David Ulrich draws on the principles of Zen practice as well as forty years of teaching photography to offer six profound lessons for developing your self-expression. Doing for photography what The Artist’s Way and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain did for their respective crafts, Zen Camera encourages you to build a visual journaling practice called your Daily Record in which photography can become a path of self-discovery. Beautifully illustrated with 83 photographs, its insights into the nature of seeing, art, and personal growth allow you to create photographs that are beautiful, meaningful, and uniquely your own. You’ll ultimately learn to change the way you interact with technology—transforming it into a way to uncover your innate power of attention and mindfulness, to see creatively, and to live authentically.

Zen Camera is an unprecedented photography practice that guides you to the creativity at your fingertips, calling for nothing more than your vision and any camera, even the one embedded in your phone. David Ulrich draws on the principles of Zen practice as well as forty years of teaching photography to offer six profound lessons for developing your self-expression. Doing for photography what The Artist’s Way and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain did for their respective crafts, Zen Camera encourages you to build a visual journaling practice called your Daily Record in which photography can become a path of self-discovery. Beautifully illustrated with 83 photographs, its insights into the nature of seeing, art, and personal growth allow you to create photographs that are beautiful, meaningful, and uniquely your own. You’ll ultimately learn to change the way you interact with technology—transforming it into a way to uncover your innate power of attention and mindfulness, to see creatively, and to live authentically.

FOREWORD BY GUY KAWASAKI Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the Net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Once camera assistants have learned and practiced the rules of their job, they can then begin to explore and test their limits. Stressing theory as well as hands-on experience, Optics and Focus for Camera Assistants melds technical knowledge and skills with technique and attitude to provide key information on one of the most vital parts of a camera assistant's job: focus. Assistants will learn how to make themselves invaluable on the set by being able to apply theoretical approaches to problem solving, allowing them to extrapolate from theory to any practical situation, as opposed to following cook-book style solutions. The book also stresses enhanced techniques for greater speed and precision in routine equipment-handling procedures. In addition to covering such important topics as diagnostic optics for use in the field, fundamental and advanced estimating and focus techniques, and depth of field, Optics and Focus for Camera Assistants also offers essential information on how best to be mentally and physically prepared for the job. Fritz Hershey has been a freelance camera assistant for more than 15 years, working principally on commercials. His feature film credits include Year of the Dragon.

Discover your voice, cultivate mindful awareness, and inspire creative growth with photography

In The Mindful Photographer, teacher, author, and photographer David Ulrich follows up on the success of his previous book, Zen Camera, by offering photographers, smartphone camera users, and other cultural creatives 55 short (1-5 pages) essays on topics related to photography, mindfulness, personal growth, creativity, and cultivating personal and social awareness. Whether you’re seeking to become a better photographer, find your voice, enhance your ability to “see” the world around you, realize your full potential, or refine your personal expression, The Mindful Photographer can help you. You will learn to:

• Awaken your creative spirit

• Find joy and fulfillment with a camera

• Improve your photography

• Express your deepest vision of the world

• Learn to be more present in the moment

• Deepen your capacity for observation

• Gain insight into your self and others

• Cultivate mindful seeing

• Use your camera as a tool for change

• Enhance your visual literacy

• And much more

You can read this beautiful, richly illustrated book in order, following its inherent structure, or you can dive into the book anywhere that appeals to you, following your own stream of interest. No matter how you read and work through the book—many of the essays contain exercises, working practices, and quotes from well-known photographers—you will learn to deepen your engagement with the world and discover a rich source of creativity within you through the act of taking pictures.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Seek Resonance
Camera Practice
Avoid the Merely Pictorial
Pictures are Not About Pictures
Visual Learning
First Sight; Beginner’s Eye
The Camera in Your Hand
Seeing from the Body
It’s All About Hormones
Attention and Distraction
Keep the French Fries
Becoming Good
Audience
Fitting into the Flow of Time
Catch the Wave, Not the Ripple
Of Time and Light
In Space
Finding Your Mojo
River of Consciousness
Why Selfies?
When to Put the Camera Down
Mindful Sight
Creative Time
Minding the Darkness
Potency of Metaphor
Mapping the Internal Terrain
What Helps?
Analyzing Your Images
Sift, Edit, and Refine
Sequencing
Experiment
Become the Camera
Music of the Spheres
InSeeing
Fifty/Fifty
Creative Mind and Not Knowing
Trust Your Process
Digital Life
Steal Like an Artist
Art is a Lie that Tells the Truth
Use Irony Sparingly
Embrace Paradox
When to be Tender, When to Snarl, When to Shout, and When to Whisper
Sharpness is a Bourgeois Concept
Learn to Love the Questions
The Wisdom of Chance
Awake in the World
The Cruel Radiance of What Is
Hope and Despair
Companions on the Way
Coherence and Presence
Wholeness and Order
Creative Intensity
Sea of Images
The Power of Art

The Zen of Photography: How to Take Pictures with your Mind's Camera is a collection of 100 sayings that the author has written over a 25 year period. By merging the study of photography and the study of Zen philosophy, one learns to use a camera a way of connecting more fully with the world. Consequently, a camera is not used as a wall between what is seen and what is experienced, but is a tool that serves to unite the photographer with what is experienced through the photographic process. This book teaches that photography is much more than f-stops, shutter speed and aperture settings, film choices, and camera purchases. If photography were merely a technical operation, robots could take great pictures. Learning is about readiness. Because you are a loving, thinking person who found this book, you want to be inspired to elevate your picture taking to a level in which you learn from the moments you observe and teach others to be moved by those moments. This book is ready for you. AUTHOR BIO: Paul Martin Lester is a Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. After an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and employment as a photojournalist for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Lester received a Master's from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from Indiana University in mass communications. He is the author or editor of seven books.

Photographic equipment & techniques.

For many of us, the return of Zen conjures up images of rock gardens and gently flowing waterfalls. We think of mindfulness and meditation, immersion in a state of being where meaning is found through simplicity. Zen lore has been absorbed by Western practitioners and pop culture alike, yet there is a specific area of this ancient tradition that hasn’t been fully explored in the West. Now, in The Zen of Creativity, American Zen master John Daido Loori presents a book that taps the principles of the Zen arts and aesthetic as a means to unlock creativity and find freedom in the various dimensions of our existence. Loori dissolves the barriers between art and spirituality, opening up the possibility of meeting life with spontaneity, grace, and peace. Zen Buddhism is steeped in the arts. In spiritual ways, calligraphy, poetry, painting, the tea ceremony, and flower arranging can point us toward our essential, boundless nature. Brilliantly interpreting the teachings of the artless arts, Loori illuminates various elements that awaken our creativity, among them still point, the center of each moment that focuses on the tranquility within; simplicity, in which the creative process is uncluttered and unlimited, like a cloudless sky; spontaneity, a way to navigate through life without preconceptions, with a freshness in which everything becomes new; mystery, a sense of trust in the unknown; creative feedback, the systematic use of an audience to receive noncritical input about our art; art koans, exercises based on paradoxical questions that can be resolved only through artistic expression. Loori shows how these elements interpenetrate and function not only in art, but in all our endeavors. Beautifully illustrated and punctuated with poems and reflections from Loori’s own spiritual journey, The Zen of Creativity presents a multilayered, bottomless source of insight into our creativity. Appealing equally to spiritual seekers, artists, and veteran Buddhist practitioners, this book is perfect for those wishing to discover new means of self-awareness and expression—and to restore equanimity and freedom amid the vicissitudes of our lives.