Photography and Prayer

Thinking today about how photography and prayer can engage. I certainly often have the thought that photography is very close to prayer. If I am making a landscape photograph then in a sense I am not far from eg Psalm 19. I rather like this blog of Bill Walsh I came across:

9 Reasons I'm a Photographer
I'm not here thinking of using photographs as part of prayer (though that can be invaluable), but photography itself as close to prayer.
Take Psalm 8:

3 ¶  When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

4  What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

Making a photograph (as against taking a snap) involves considering. It involves stopping, looking, reflecting, seeing.
C.S. Lewis speaks of "the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live" (Preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology.)

Maggie Ross in The Fire of Your Life, p 16, who there seeks to widen our understanding of visions, to embrace the secular understanding of vision as well as the mystical, says:

"The mystics find the universe, seen and unseen, in hazelnuts, grains of sand, and wild flowers. Their visions communicate to us a vision, a perspective, that widens the lens of our hearts, enabling us to glimpse through their a depth of field we had not dreamed existed."

Although she does not mention photography, I can only imagine that the references here (lens, depth of field) are intentional analogies. And in fact, the photographer in photographing such and other items and events, is doing exactly the same thing.

So this takes us beyond photography as prayer to photography as vision.
Perhaps for me it can be a way of helping live out these
10 Resolutions for Mental Health