It's Monday, June 18th, 2007, and this is the Candid Frame.

Today's guest is Michael Wood, a photographer where I became aware of through one of my listeners, Scott Jones, who had attended one of Michael's Mixong workshops.

Based on a Tibetan Buddhist philosophy,

Mixong, which translates the good eye, is an approach to the nature of perception. If you've ever gone out shooting and found yourself of what some of us call the zone, that mental state

where you're really in tune with what's around us and the images suddenly seem to be

everywhere. You'll have a sense of what Michael's approach to photography offers. It's an interesting

topic and I personally appreciated the opportunity to discuss an aspect of photography that I've

experienced myself but that I never had the opportunity to dialogue on in the way that I did today.

So I hope you enjoy our conversation with Michael Wood.

Well, Michael, thank you for joining us on the show.

It's great to have you on.

It's one of the conversations I've been looking forward to.

Well, thank you for having me.

Let's start off with your career as a photographer, because I see here that you actually had

formal training as a photographer up in Canada.

So before we get into the discussion of the way you work currently, why don't you tell me

about your beginnings as a photographer?

Well, I began studying photography in Canada.

There was a visual art school near Toronto, Ontario, and I studied there for three years.

And I pretty much studied all of the various types of photography, and I ended up kind of specializing in portraiture

and fine art in college. And when I left college, I had about a 15-year career as a portrait

photographer, and also I did a lot of work for newspapers, magazines, kind of editorial stuff.

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