How to keep your life flowing.

Someone once said that if you're going to be a songwriter you'll eventually have to write a song about a river.

I'm not a songwriter but the metaphor of a river isn't lost on me.

A river begins from a source and its raison d'etre is finding a way to a larger more holistic and encompassing source. The journey of a river is the path to oneness and whether we admit it to ourselves or not...becoming whole is the ultimate human accomplishment.

Our lives are like rivers; meandering and occasionally lost, sometimes moving slowly and sometimes with power, intent and passion.  A river will always seek the easiest most efficient route to the source; navigating past obstacles and pooling in difficult spots until it has the power and intent to move ahead.

A river in its full expression is a beautiful thing; flowing, vital, powerful, direct, purposeful. Conversely a river that has become lost is stagnant, searching, confused.

For our lives to be like dynamic rivers we have to keep the flow going, avoiding attributes that slow the flow such as fear, hoarding, jealousy, envy, anger and doubt.

Are you afraid to quit your job and jump into entrepreneurship?
Are you envious of a colleague who appears to be more successful than you?
Do you reject the deserving raise of an employee's salary so you can retain more for yourself?

There's a lot of ways to constrict the flow. The best way to generate the flow of energy in your life is to give away that which you want most.

Do you want to become more successful in your career? Help others become successful through investment, mentorship or emotional support.

Do you want more love in your life? Give it away to strangers on the street via genuine compliments and random acts of kindness.

The popular assumption is that if you want something in life you have to struggle for it,  take it and hold on to it tightly. I don't believe that is so, as hoarding only constrict the flow.

The Buddha once said that everything we need to learn from life we can observe in Nature. A river is the prime example.

New work as Director: The Making of a Shoe

This little ditty comes on the heels of a larger campaign I shot for Louise Philippe. I wanted to do a fun film piece for them which showed the detailed process of what goes into the making of a shoe.

We shot this on the Arri Alexa with fast lenses as I was adamant about the shallow depth of field. The edit took a while and the look was fairly drab till we got it into the Smoke room and punched the hell out of the blacks.

check it out here:

"The Making of A Shoe" for Louise Philippe

Directed by Martin Prihoda
DOP: Vasu Rane
Music: Sanjoy Dazz
Producer: Rajiv V, Scrambled Eggs

Beware the Collective Unconscious

You may have experienced the Collective Unconscious in statements such as these:

-Good jobs are scarce
-It's nearly impossible to make a living as an artist
-The outlook for the global economy and environment is bleak
-We have to struggle and suffer for our success
-Survival is for the fittest
-The world is a dangerous place, defined by war and the competition for limited resources

The Collective Unconscious is passed down to us through our parents, peers, teachers, churches and mass media. It defines our thinking and actions not only as a culture but as individuals, masquerading as a set of unquestioned beliefs widely accepted as truth.

If you feel that life is a struggle, the world is unsafe and that your survival depends on your ability to compete aggressively you may be suffering at the hands of the Collective Unconscious.

The deeper I dig into my own reality, the more I realize that a lot of what I hold as fact are nothing more than fuzzy half truths and lazy stereotypes rooted in ignorance and the very human need to belong.

As awareness increases there's a realization that perhaps these long held social beliefs are not entirely in line with one's personal convictions.

An effective way the combat the Collective Unconscious is to meditate on the positive aspects of your life. Focussing on what's front of you: Your health, your family, your friends and relationships, your mind and the ability to change it anytime you want, your breath and whatever else it is in your life that allows you to be happy, free and at peace.

Creating space in the mind through meditation helps us break through the dark clouds of doubt and move into clarity and awareness. With the correct intention and practice it is our innate wisdom that begins to define our world view.

Creating Mental Space

On any given day I do the following:

Coordinate with: stylists, producers, retouchers, model and advertising agencies, photo editors, art directors, camera vendors, studio managers. I answer emails, write emails, have breakfast and dinner with my family, pay suppliers, talk to my accountants and finance team, book fights, chase clients for late payments, go to pre-production meetings, go to pitch meetings, spend time with my kid, create reference slides, edit images and/or footage, create estimates, make invoices, maybe even shoot something.

Its really easy to get lost in all of it and even easier to lose track of why you're doing it in the first place.

What helps me get through all this and still enjoy a glass of wine at night with my wife is a committed meditation practice. Here's how I feel if I don't meditate:

-reactive
-mentally drained
-loss of reference
-sluggish
-cluttered
-difficulty concentrated on one task
-loss in sight of larger goals
-negative and limited thinking
-the world seems more closed
-a sense of sadness

What sitting for 30 minutes a day does to one's mental space is incredible. I think that with all the scientific study around the practice of meditation its safe to say that the practice is no longer the secretive realm of monks and yogis. Its a legitimate tool for better living.

Meditation creates mental space. A sense of unboundedness. Breathing room in a cluttered world that moves at lighting speed. Sitting in quiet silence makes room for the awareness we need to set strong, affirming intentions.

Here's what I feel with a daily, committed meditation practice :

-Lightness
-heightened awareness
-more 'in the moment' presence
-less reactivity, more compassion
-sense of expansion
-able to set clear intentions
-improved relationships with others
-improved concentration
-increased sense of abundance

overall, happier.

You can start with 5 minutes a day, and then increase as you go. You'll notice the difference right away.

1. choose a time you wont be disturbed, I prefer the early morning before everyone gets up
2. light a candle, or incense or whatever you choose to create that 'sacred' space
3. sit comfortably with your back straight, close your eyes
4. breath deeply and focus your attention on your breath
5. when you mind becomes distracted simply bring it back to your breath.
6. when your chosen time is up, open your eyes slowly and take a few moments to relax before starting your day.

your life will begin to change for the better ;-)

New Work: GQ cover with Priyanka Chopra

Working with a major celebrity always has its challenges but combine that with a brief from the art director that requires low light shooting, mixing ambient and continuous light as well as a major time constraint and you've got a photographer on his toes.

My 3rd GQ cover, this one was probably the most stressful. I had a lighting approach in mind but as often happens, it got thrown out the window.

At one point we had three light sources going: a projector throwing an image against a white wall, a couple of gelled 2k's and 5k's to give a 'concert' feel and of course a few strobe lights on our celebrity.

All in all I'm pretty happy with how this shoot turned out, as was the magazine.

Photography: Martin Prihoda
Fashion Stylist: Antara Motiwala
Hair: Gabriel Georgiou
Makeup: Subhash Vagal
Production: Temple Road
Post Production: Happy Finish

Doors of the Greek Islands

Whenever I travel somewhere I always try and throw in a little personal work, no matter how inane it might seem. You start something and then it basically takes over. I was in Greece this past September, sailing the beautiful Cyclades Islands. On top of the regular family shots I started feeling this compulsion towards doors.

There were some pretty cool doors; old ones, new ones, rusty, stone, decrepit, quirky. Once you start you can't stop. It becomes slightly obsessive...

Silencio

Holy crap, I haven't updated my blog in 2 months. All good though, just been slammed and haven't felt like writing much.

Sometimes you just have nothing to say.

Some thoughts on Dying and the Nature of Mind

'The Pursuit of Truth' by my good friend Prashant Miranda

The theme running through my writing (for pretty much as long as I have been keeping this blog) has been this idea that there exists in each of us an infinite wellspring of creativity, potential and wisdom.

The sufi mystics call it 'The Inner Essence', the Buddha called it 'Buddha nature' and the Christians regard it simply as 'Christ Consciousness'

Its lies in a deeper and ultimately more obscured part of our being. It is an infinite, unchanging and aware dimension that rests behind the mad, fickle and distracted emotional discord of our everyday existence.

It is the deep blue sky, hidden behind a flighty, skittish and cloudy mind.

Pull back the veils of lust, anger, addiction, jealousy and blinding distraction and you'll find a sea of wisdom, peace and infinite potential that is rarely alluded to in contemporary culture.

I feel compelled to talk about this because accessing this part ourselves is scarcely talked about let alone  taught to our children. Our education system strives to socialize and in many ways strengthens the fickle mind through the imparting of rote knowledge and instilling notions of competition and separateness. Everywhere you look you can see we're geared for distraction; perhaps because its easier to sell us stuff that way.

In the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche explains that all of life is actually a preparation for the moment of Death. In fact he goes on to say that the moment of death is the singular most important moment in the life of a human being, even more important than one's birth.

This moment is so important because our death is not actually a 'death' but a metamorphosis, a transmutation. Some may call it re-incarnation but the truth is that it is our awareness at the moment of 'death' that determines our next phase of actuality.

In fact, with every little choice we make we are engaging and re-inforcing the birth/death cycle. A choice is simply potential, so really when we choose we are experiencing the death of one set of potential and the birth of another.

For example if you're at the used car dealership and you choose a red Mustang over a black BMW, the potential of owning the BMW has dies and the potential of owning the Mustang is born and that sort of thing goes on and on with every single choice we make.

The same is for our overall physical life. The Buddha says that even in the moment of our physical dying we have a choice.

By tapping into our deeper mind, we're actually connecting to the awareness of life. If we can make our decisions from this place instead of from the distracted and unstable monkey mind then we stand a much better chance of guiding our lives towards quickened evolution and ultimately enlightenment...which is a breaking of the prison like cycle of Samsara; the wheel of birth, death and re-birth...the escape from which is ultimate goal of every being.

For me then, creativity is not about taking better pictures or writing better stories, though that does tend to be a nice effect, its about having the awareness to turn right, where I've always turned left.

Exploring and knowing that inner mind, that infinite god-like presence within me while battling the volatility of my mercurial emotions and evolving beyond them is my life's mission

and as I've also said since as long as I can remember...I've got a long way to go.