Flow-tography Better Photos Now

This photography book is about falling in love with your life. Not about changing it, or wishing it was someone else’s, but about slowing down to truly experience and appreciate the beauty of your life, exactly the way it is right now. Flow-tography reveals the secret power of beauty as a source of creative energy and wellbeing. This book offers a way to cultivate your relationship with the mystical in daily life by seeing and photographing the world through the eyes of your Curious Soul. Whether you are just starting out or have been taking photos for years, you will benefit from this fresh approach to looking through the lens. Don’t be surprised if after reading this book you see your photos with a new sense of awe and wonder. You may even be thinking, wow did I take that photo? The answer will be yes, yes, yes! Do you long to have this experience more often, not by chance, but by choice? Then, Flow-tography's intuitive approach can help you do just that.

This book suggests the secret to taking great photos is not what you think is the right object or angle, but what you feel, as you experience different forms of beauty. Flow-tography offers a simple approach to improving your photographs not by acquiring more technical expertise, but by doing the opposite. This intuitive approach begins with discovering how to enter the creative zone, or flow state at will. Flow-tography guides you to get back in touch with what you love, while you rediscover what makes you feel most alive and present. You’ll discover your sense of beauty and sense of self becomes stronger as you progress. The process outlined in this book helps you reclaim your creativity and awaken your Curious Soul. This instinctive approach to photography focuses first on reconnecting to an inner sense of what is beautiful and authentic to you by introducing Eight Universal Patterns of Beauty such as simplicity or vitality. Next Merritt helps you explore how to connect to the heart of the moment more deeply to take the photo from within the aesthetic experience. The deeper your experience of beauty, the more you will be delighted with the photo. In the third section, you discover how to use your natural aesthetic judgment to lightly edit photos. By discovering how to amplify the essence, your photos will come closer to the lived experience being photographed. When an image matches our memory, we know it, we love it, we share it. Your final photograph becomes a thing of beauty in its own right. The 134 page book has a whimsical look and feel with 40 hand-written and illustrated pages. The audio prompts and a video demonstration, quickly give you a sense of the depth and scope of the instructional content. Although the medium of photography is the focus of this book, the practices and tools introduced can be applied to any form of creative expression you choose. If you want to develop your creative self, or encourage this in others, Flow-tography guides you along the path. You will quickly learn to follow the three step framework: Collect experiences of beauty by deepening your powers of observation, Connect to the one thing that speaks to you, and Create your expression of beauty from your experience. The Eight Universal Patterns of Beauty such as vitality, luminosity, utility, complexity, simplicity, synchronicity, unity, and sublimity, offer a practical system for self-discovery. This book teaches you how to identify with your own pattern of beauty through photography, and gives you inspiration and guidance to use this knowledge to make your life even more meaningful and joyful.

Suzanne Merritt has been taking photographs non-stop since the day her parents loaned her their prized turquoise Kodak Instamatic in 1972. She was only 16 when she headed on her first airplane trip from her home in Scranton PA to Washington, D.C. Entranced by the clouds from her window seat, she shot all 36 slides on the roll before the plane reached its destination. She was unaware this was her first of many Flow-tography experiences. This early interest in photography led her to start her own street photography business and later to join Polaroid Corporation where she was the Founder of the Polaroid Creativity Lab. It was here, surrounded by compelling photos of Ansel Adams she began to develop her intuitive method for capturing the beauty of the moment. In Flow-tography, Suzanne draws on her masters in aesthetic education, twenty years of creativity training experience, and life long passion for photography. In the book she introduces readers to her eight universal patterns of beauty such as luminosity and vitality that have the power to transform readers lives. She also leads Curious Soul retreats around the world to places of natural beauty so workshop participants can experience photography and all other forms of art making as a spiritual practice. Suzanne currently has a studio at the Boston Center for the Arts.