The Zen of Photography

“walking the path from vision to image”
is what photography is all about to me.
First, the vision exists only in one’s head
but as soon as it is turned into an image,
it’s there for all to see and enjoy.

Hi, I’m Bruno-Maria Brys.

For as long as I can think
beautiful images have made
my heart beat faster, which is
why I became a photographer.

The Zen of Photography is all about awareness, an awareness that let’s one discover the timeless beauty in a single moment.

The awareness that lets us see the breathtaking spectacle that is all around us, all the way down to the smallest detail.

…but most of all, it’s about the mesmerizing treasures that are constantly presented to us by the Master-Painter itself: Nature!

Feeling inspired? Contact us
and find out how you can
start your own journey into
the Zen of Photography.

I had no idea, when I won my first award at the age of 11, that my love affair with photography would span my entire life. The passion – which some would call obsession – keeps on growing! Although I have done a lot of portrait work over the years, a telling fact is that the first four rolls of film, I shot with my own camera as a boy, didn’t contain any living being. It was years later that I was able to put my finger on it: to me, photography is always about painting…painting with light. From an early age I was fascinated by color, texture, composition. Maybe that has something to do with my Flemish genes which centuries ago, produced schools of famous painters.

Till today, I find the biggest thrill in trying to capture the mesmerizing beauty, created by the master-painter: Nature!

I find it in the way Nature has used mineral deposits to create explosions of texture and color, as can be seen here in this rare form of landscape in China.

But I also find it in the tooth of decay that has gnawed at man-made structures, as in the composition with this now dilapidated object that was once a steam engine in South Africa. To be able to capture this, technique matters and here is why: what we see and what the camera sees, are two very different things. When we understand that difference, we can control the outcome in the resulting image.

Grasping these essentials is the start of every photography course I have taught. Every manual will tell you what you can set on your camera, but few words are lost about when or why you would need it. One has to understand the medium in which one works and master it. Only after that does the question of artistic merit become relevant. At that point, composition is what it’s all about. Universal laws govern composition. You need to know these laws to be able to apply them…and to know, when to break them.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the vision in the mind’s eye of the photographer…cameras don’t take pictures, consciousness does! Which brings us back to…the Zen of Photography. Want to learn that? Just contact us.