Photography as Prayer

Rona Talcott

About this app

Photography as Prayer is a meditative app that will quickly give you a new and exciting way to become focused and calm as you use your phone’s camera in guided, simple-to-follow ten-minute photo-meditations. Each practice is designed to help you develop an easily accessible way to shut off the noise and tensions in your life any time day or night. As you do the photo practices, you will find yourself not only making beautiful pictures, but increasingly centered and ultimately more deeply connected with yourself.

The practices are short. They are not done sitting quietly in a darkened room. You will make photographs in a focused way that will leave you feeling refreshed and positive. The app includes easy to follow photo-meditative practices, a step-by-step field guide, a contributors gallery, its own camera with a personal file to keep and share your photographs. Best of all is the Prayer Book. Use it to create your own personal prayers and messages using your favorite photographs. Your photographs and prayer book entries can be shared on social media, texted, emailed, or printed. For some users, Photography as Prayer is a private personal practice used only for centering calm, creative and spiritual expression. Others share their practice with their faith-based communities and friends. The choice is yours and yours alone.

Ratings and reviews

The concept of contemplative photography is excellent, but the program has bugs. I would prefer to shoot with my phone's camera app as it is more full-featured than shooting from within the program. I figured out how I could import images from my gallery, so that's a workaround. The problem is nothing I can do will import images into the prayer book. There's nothing that indicates how to complete that operation. Simply returning to the prayer book page leaves the photo space blank.

This app opens your eyes to the everyday world that surrounds us with all kinds of beauty. Each module encourages a new perspective while playing with simple phone options that anyone can try. As an Android fan, I started with my old Motorola phone and recently upgraded to Motorola One 5G. Both phones worked great with the app! Now I find five minutes every day to snap something fun, a lovely uplifting moment to break the monotony of these crazy coronavirus days.