haiku^ photo

The videos and assignments are free. (We do request a $9.95 donation at the very end, but this is optional). One-on-one zoom critiques and meetings with Rubin are completely optional, but are scheduled and priced separately. The Haiku Photo Club is separate.

Not at all. Haiku have a small set of rules, and those ideals can specifically be applied to images with interesting results.

Haiku photos are a personal kind of photojournalism. They’re quite dynamic, and surprisingly hard to execute. But just knowing about them will change the way you look at things.

Not really. You have to have an interest in photography—either taking pictures or appreciating them—but no special skills.

Not really. Any camera will work just fine. If you have a iPhone you have everything you need.

That said, if this is a fun approach for you, i’d recommend any kind of camera where you can control the basics of exposure, depth, and focus. I have one decent camera with one zoom lens and it’s absolutely enough. But this is not about gear and tech.

Not at all. You’ll learn everything you need to know in the first video: ”The Discovery.”

For the longest time, all I knew about haiku was the 5-7-5 thing, and that they tended to be weirdly obtuse. Learning about haiku deepened my enjoyment of photography.

If you’re a professional photographer, this will be unlike anything you’ve ever heard. This story isn’t about anything technical or proscriptive; it’s about understanding more about what makes some photos better than others.

And if you’re a professional historian or collector, this will be an interesting take on photographic history and technique.

The main instructional video is 80 minutes and fundamental to everything else.

Each of the 9 assignments can be as long or short as you make them. Each involves shooting 3 images that exercise your skills at one of the haiku attributes, and then trying to put them together at the end. Some people can do an assignment in a few minutes; others enjoy working on them for hours or days.

This curriculum is frequently taught as 6 2-hour sessions through the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops.

The curriculum is the same. The advantage of the self-guided program is simply how much time you can spend on the assignments.

The In-person and Zoom-based workshops spend considerable time in critique- most students say the critiques are the best part, even listening to other students’ crits. The Haiku Photo Club, available after you complete this course, gives you an opportunity for community and monthly critiques.

Maybe, but probably not.

This course is about using haiku and Zen arts to inform our photography, and not about using photography to explore Zen.

Not at all. “Haiga” is a specific art form that combines haiku with images to create a visual and poetic synergy. We’re not doing that here.

Here we want the images to stand alone, self-explanatory, a little sketch.

While it literally means “break and subdue,” the description I like is from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank: “the swift spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.”