This is especially clear in portraiture. A com-myos portrait is a collaboration. The camera becomes a mirror held between two people. When Rembrandt painted, he did not merely render flesh; he rendered the sitting , the hours of shared presence. Likewise, a com-myos portrait records the relationship—the trust, the shyness, the flicker of recognition. The best portraits seem to look back at the viewer, not because the subject was beautiful, but because they were allowed to be real . The camera’s click is a small vow: I see you, and in seeing you, I become visible to myself .
In practice, the com-myos photographer cultivates shoshin (beginner’s mind). Each frame is a fresh encounter. The exposure settings—shutter speed, aperture, ISO—are not technical hurdles but rhythmic partners. A slow shutter reveals the myo of motion: water becoming silk, crowds dissolving into ghosts. A wide aperture isolates a face against a blur of bokeh, showing how attention creates its own ontology. The photographer learns that sharpness is a choice, not a virtue; that blur, grain, and flare are not errors but the camera’s own voice singing the world’s uncertainty. Com-myos-camera
Consider the practice of photographing a flower. A conventional approach might seek the perfect lighting, the sharpest focus, the most striking composition. The com-myos approach asks: What is this flower’s own time? How does its being-there call to be seen? The photographer becomes a bodhisattva of attention —not a master but a midwife, bringing forth the flower’s myo (its subtle, wondrous suchness) into visible form. The camera, then, is not a barrier but a membrane. It filters, yes, but it also facilitates contact. Through the viewfinder, the dualism of “me” and “flower” softens; there is only the event of seeing-being-seen. The character myo (妙) appears in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō as part of myōhō (wondrous Dharma), pointing to the inexpressible depth of ordinary things. A pebble, a breath, a shadow—each holds a mystery that eludes conceptual capture. The com-myos-camera is precisely that which does not aim to capture. Instead, it invites . The camera’s mechanical eye, paradoxically, reveals the non-mechanical texture of the real. When light passes through the aperture and imprints a sensor or film, we witness a literal co-production: photons that have traveled from a distant sun or a nearby lamp touch silicon or silver, mediated by glass and human intention. This is not representation; this is continuation . This is especially clear in portraiture
This is why the com-myos-camera rejects the tyranny of the “decisive moment.” That concept, as popularized by Cartier-Bresson, still assumes a singular, external climax—a peak of action that the photographer seizes. Com-myos temporality is different. It is the durational : the camera records not an instant but an interval, a breathing span during which shutter opens and closes. In that interval, the world offers itself, and the photographer offers back their gaze. The resulting image is a trace of that mutual gift. As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh might say, the photograph is an interbeing —a place where tree and lens, wind and memory, have met and left footprints. If the camera reveals co-arising, then photography is inherently ethical. The com-myos-camera asks: Who is present in this image, and how are they present? The colonial gaze, the tourist’s snapshot, the paparazzo’s telephoto—these are violations of myo, for they reduce the other to a specimen or a spectacle. In contrast, the com-myos approach requires permission in its deepest sense: not a legal release form but an ontological acknowledgment. The photographer and the photographed co-create the image. The subject’s myo is not a resource to be extracted; it is a dignity to be honored. When Rembrandt painted, he did not merely render