About Us -- The Mindful Eye - Photography - Education

Welcome and thank you for being here! The Mindful Eye is first of all - a community. We are much stronger when we work together. We are here to help and inspire each other in the pursuit of our passions, happiness and the unlimited potential of our dreams as photographers and as human beings. The contributors to The Mindful Eye (TME) believe that the simple act of sharing your joy with your camera can change the world for the better.

You will find a wealth of knowledge here about all things photographic. If you go to our Features page you will find a listing by category of all of our currently available content and a description of what you can expect to learn from the articles and video content within each feature. All of our featured content is available for free to anyone who registers on The Mindful Eye. Registration is free. On the TME home page you will always find links to the three most recently released articles and/or videos.

Our video tutorials are streamed in a very large window and the player itself works across all platforms and browsers without the need for any additional software. Videos are available in this very high quality format for two weeks from their release date after which time they will be archived to YouTube or a similar hosting solution. In addition, the Daily Critique is available as a high quality download during the same two-week window. A DVD archive of our high resolution past video content will be available for purchase several times a year. Please click on our store link (which will become available in the next few months) for more details about purchasing an archive of past content.

Our home page, in addition to listing our new recent content, is where you will find the latest TME News announcements. The TME home page is also where you will find The Photo of the Week. The Photo of the Week will be chosen from TME community members submissions and may also be chosen from TME workshop participants assignment images. Send us your favorite shots. We will not only pick one each week to feature from Friday to the following Thursday on the home page, but we will also feature your image in a video feature released on Fridays called The Photo of the Week on the Daily Critique. This video will detail, in the context of the language of visual design, why the image was chosen by TME contributors to be a Photo of the Week and also give you the meta data and backstory for each image.

In addition to the The Photo of the Week there are a couple of other areas of the site to which you can submit your work. The first is The Daily Critique. This feature of our site is a daily video presentation (Monday through Friday) where we create a supportive review of your image in the context of learning the language of visual design. Our Inspiration feature gives you a chance to inspire other photographers all over the world by sharing a portfolio of your work. We take your submitted portfolio and create a video slide show and give voice to the story behind your best work. To submit images to TME click on the Image Submission link in the side menu bar.

If you are looking for more of a hands on learning experience look no further than The Mindful Eye Workshops. Our average student to teacher ratio is one of the lowest in the business. Our instructors are working professional photographers who have an intense passion for sharing and inspiring. We fully recognize the commitment of time, energy and money it takes for you to attend a workshop. So we work very hard to be the best at intimately knowing our locations, providing a wealth of high quality information via excellent presentations and one on one help in the field, presenting extremely supportive and highly detailed image reviews, and doing all of this in an energy rich, supportive environment where inspiration and having fun never take a back seat to anything. Click on Workshops in the menu bar to see a listing of the TME 2009 workshop schedule.

Click on Community in the menu bar to share your work now, to be inspired, to get a question answered, to help a fellow photographer, or to just enjoy the camaraderie of friends who share mutual passions. We have one of the most supportive and caring photographic communities online. Please help us to keep it that way. Its the intention and spirit behind what we do that matters and we hope like us, you will approach others you meet here under the assumption that we all ultimately want the same thing – to be free to pursue our happiness, to be appreciated for where we are on our path right now and to be supported in our desire to expand our vision through new experience.

This site is for you so we would love to hear your feedback about what works for you and we would also love to hear your "in a perfect world" suggestions for improvement. We would also love to hear your ideas about future content.

There is a lot here!!! So dive in and learn, become inspired, create, share and enjoy!!!

----------------

Mindful is a concentrated, present awareness of one's thoughts, actions or motivations.