Kat Eye Studio

Archives for November 2012

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Time for Contrast

I did a little bit of time travel last weekend. I went back in time in my photos to find some German pretzels for an exhibition submission (the theme is Taste and Flavor: Salty) and I ran into this gem of an image:

A perfect fit for Exploring with a Camera: Chiaroscuro! I love it when that happens. I had visions of creating some self-portraits with dramatic light for this week’s Exploring with a Camera post, but with being sick and having visitors that did not happen. Luckily this image came along and presented itself to me.

The original image was already a good example of strong light/dark contrast, but I edited it to increase the contrast. I also moved the clarity slider in Lightroom to the left instead of the right, to give it a softer feel. I think the result is a bit mysterious, making me travel back in time. Don’t you want to know the story of this pocket watch? If you like the look, I’ll be sharing this Lightroom Preset in the newsletter tomorrow.

Thanks to all of you who have been linking in! I love that you are getting out of your comfort zone and trying a new type of lighting in your images. Stop by and visit those who have been linking in, below. The images are gorgeous! The link up remains open through 30 November.

Also, stop by and visit me on the An Attitude of Gratitude blog today, where I’m talking about what photography means to me.



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The Best Laid Plans

I had plans last week. Plans to be creative and get started on some new projects. Early in the week I wrote my blog posts ahead, which I rarely do, so I could have extended time to write on Thursday and Friday morning. And then…

I got sick.

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Not horribly sick or anything. Just enough to use that extra writing time I had freed up for sleep. Not sick enough to stay in bed all day but enough to have no creative energy. For those of you who create through chronic illness, I salute you. All I’ve wanted to do for the last week is sit in my comfy chair, cuddled up under a quilt with a book and a mug of tea.

And here I am, a week later, feeling much the same. So I’m surrendering to it. I managed to get the Digital Photography Basic eBook done and out, but that’s it for this week. It’s time to sink into my comfy chair and get better, so I can enjoy Thanksgiving tomorrow with my in-laws who are visiting from out of state.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I’ll see you back here when I’m feeling better.

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The Digital Photography Basics eBook is here… and it’s FREE!

Do you ever have those moments where an idea comes along, and it’s so perfect, you know that it’s what you’ve been waiting for? I got one of those ideas in the shower, the morning after the workshop with David duChemin in Vancouver last month. It was like it came out of no where and smacked me in the head, making me think, Of course! Why didn’t I think of that sooner!

The idea was to give away the Digital Photography Basics course material as an eBook, free.

So that’s what I’m doing, starting today. No strings attached. No requirement that you sign up for my newsletter. No bonus if you sign up for one of my classes. It’s a gift. Completely and totally free.

All you need to do is go here to the Digital Photography Basics page here on my site and download your copy.

And then, if you like it, please share it. Share with anyone who is starting out in photography, and needs access to the basics. Share it with anyone who is getting back into photography, and needs a refresher. This information was meant to be out there, helping others learn the basics so they can develop the technical skills to move toward photography as an expression of heart and soul. This was the realization that made me do a little happy dance in the shower that morning.

And here’s why…

I had been trying to figure out what to do with this material. I wrote it in late 2010, as part of the first Find Your Eye eCourse I taught in early 2011. At the time, it seemed important to include this technical information with the Find Your Eye journey, because understanding how to use the tools of photography to get the image you want is the very first step to finding your eye. If you can’t consistently create images you love with the tools at hand, it is going to be hard to have a style.

I discovered in that first course it was way too much to include this material with the Find Your Eye material. There were three lessons a week and the participants could barely keep up. Not only that, many of the participants already knew these technical basics, and didn’t need the information. So after that first run I decided to pull the technical material out, and created Digital Photography Basics as a standalone eCourse. I ran it in late 2011 on its own for the first time, with great reviews. I modified it to be an On Demand eCourse in early 2012 so that the material was always available, because who wants to wait months to take a course when you just got a new camera? So I thought I was set. My plan was to run Digital Photography Basics once a year as an instructor-led eCourse with the On Demand course available anytime.

Only I discovered, earlier this year, that I didn’t want to teach it as an instructor-led eCourse anymore. I learned last fall, as part of my quest for balance, that I could reasonably run only one eCourse at a time. And my schedule was filling up. If I wanted to add more creative eCourses, which I have plans to do, I didn’t have room for this course in my schedule anymore. So, what to do with the material?

It seemed a logical choice: morph it into an eBook. The material was all there, ready to go, I just needed to repackage and sell it. Sell it for how much? I wanted the information to be reasonably priced, for anyone who needed it. Maybe I would add it as a bonus for my classes. I debated and dithered for months, not making any movement forward, until the idea in the shower.

The day before that idea came to me, at the conclusion of the Vancouver Gathering workshop, David duChemin encouraged us to give away our art. “Art is a gift,” he said, and talked about inexpensive ways to give our art away. I already believe strongly that our art should be liberated into the world, that it does us good to create it but does even more good when we share it. Where I hadn’t made the connection before was that my eCourses are my art, as much as photography. And here was the Digital Photography Basics material, which I had been trying to figure out what to do with, ready and waiting to be shared.

For the last four weeks, since the moment in the shower, I have had a singular purpose to get this eBook completed so that I can give it away. So that I can move to creating the next things… I have eCourses waiting to be born and other projects that need to be finished.

Here it is! A gift, for anyone who needs it. I hope that it gets out there and goes viral. Not because I expect any payback from it, but because photography has been the most beautiful gift for me, and I hope this can help others just starting out get over the learning curve and find the same. I hope you’ll help me make this happen, by using the eBook yourself and sharing it with others.

Knowing I could help even one person would be the best gift back, ever.

Digital Photography Basics

PS – You can use this button code on your blog sidebar or in a post to help me get the word out!

PPS – A big thank you goes to my volunteer proofreaders, who answered my call on Facebook and Twitter and helped me get the eBook ready to share: Chris, Judy and Beth. You are all awesome! Thank you so much!

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Into the Light

We continue our Exploring with a Camera topic of Chiaroscuro this week, with a look at walking into the light. You can get some great strong light/dark contrast when you are indoors and look out into the light. In this situation, instead of having the subject illuminated against a dark background, the subject is dark against a light background.

This image was taken at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. After a while I was overwhelmed by the museum’s vast and varied collection, so I began wandering the museum looking more at the architecture than the artifacts. I stopped at an overlook above the main doors and photographed the movement of people in and out. There was an ebb and flow to the motion. It made me wonder where all of these people are coming from, and going to. I wondered where this woman was headed with such purpose. The strong light/dark contrast, the focus and her isolation from other elements highlights her as the subject.

How is your exploration of chiaroscuro going? Have you found examples in your archives? Have you experimented yet? Share your results with us here! The link up is open until November 30, so you have plenty of time to explore.


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Reminiscent of Tuscany: A Digital Painting from Start to Finish

This week for Paint Party Friday I thought I would share this digital painting, Reminiscent of Tuscany, and the process that I used to get there. I love how this one turned out! It’s been fun to experiment and see how things evolve.

Reminiscent of Tuscany

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? With the photograph. Driving in to my worksite from a different direction, I noticed these long skinny trees. Their shape and the way the light was hitting them reminded me of the Tuscan countryside, where the long, tall trees like this line the drives. So I asked my husband to drop me off in a different place, and I walked along the path at the edge of the property to photograph these trees. I had a plan for how I wanted these trees to look as a painting, so I walked around to view different angles and framed the photograph with that end goal in mind.

Later that night, on the bus ride home actually, I brought the photograph into the Glaze app and played around with painting effects until I got what I wanted. I was going for an effect that would smooth out the edges and details. I wanted mostly the shape and form of the trees, which is reminiscent of a painting style you will often see in modern paintings of the Tuscan countryside. Below was the final result. It’s not quite as smoothed out as I was envisioning, but as close as I could get.

I liked it at this point, but it didn’t “wow” me. A couple of days later I was participating in a Holiday Bazaar and was playing with images on my iPad during the slow times. I opened an app I hadn’t played with yet, InstaEffect FX, to see what it could do. I saw this wavy rainbow filter and had an “aha” – my tree painting needed some color! Here it is with the filter applied.

The sharp edges of the wavy lines needed to be painted a bit, so it was back into Glaze to “paint” those in. I have to admit, I haven’t quite figured out how to make Glaze do what I want yet, but after experimentation I usually get to where I want it to be. Here’s the final version out of Glaze:

The last bit was cropping. Even after the painting made them less obvious, I didn’t like the distraction of the other trees on the left side of the frame. I cropped them out with the Snapseed app, and here is the final result:

Reminiscent of Tuscany

It makes me smile. I love the bright colors, the shapes, and the memory it evokes for me of a different time and place. Whether it reminds anyone else of Tuscany is not really important.

It also marks an interesting shift… it’s the first time I’ve taken a photo specifically with an end painting in mind. Even though the end painting didn’t end up anywhere near the place I had envisioned it, the image was taken for that intent, and I’m happy with the result. Pretty cool, huh?

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Five Favourite Photography Books: A Guest Post by Gilly Walker

[Note from Kat: As I mentioned yesterday, during my visit with Gilly I invited her to do a guest post, telling us about some of her favorite photography books. I’m excited to add a few to my reading list! All of the photography in this post is Gilly’s lovely work.]

This was so difficult! I have a lot of photography books and having to select just a few was tough. I love books with a passion, and I have hundreds of them. After a lot of angst and ‘how can I possibly leave that one out?’ thoughts, I’ve narrowed it down to five (well, six really – I snuck another one in). There are some wonderful books that I decided to leave out because they’re so widely known that you’ll probably already have heard of them, and in the end I thought it would be more interesting to introduce you to some other wonderful books that you might not have heard about before. Here’s my final selection……

Tao of Photography by Philippe L Gross and S I Shapiro

Don’t mix this one up with the book of the same name by Tom Ang! – Ang’s book (which I also have) is not nearly so good. This one’s for you if you have any interest in Eastern philosophies or how they relate to photography, and how being in the present moment, becoming mindful, and being receptive to whatever presents itself to you, can take your photography to a new level. The emphasis is on encouraging you to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s wonderfully illustrated with classic black and white photographs and interesting quotes. The book itself is in square format, quite large, and as you might expect, rather Zen-like in its layout, with lots of white space and classic design. It’s a beautiful object in itself, with many full-page reproductions of photographs by some of photography’s ‘greats’, often accompanied on the facing page by a relevant quote.

And – sneaking an extra book in here – if you like Tao of Photography
, then you’ll also enjoy The Practice of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood. It draws on Buddhist philosophy, although it’s not overtly about Buddhism, and uses mindfulness techniques to help you see the extraordinary in the ordinary. This book’s in colour, as opposed to Tao which is black and white, so it might suit you better if you’re more of a colour person. And again, it’s chock full of wonderful, inspiring photos. I just couldn’t choose between them, so I’m offering you both.

Century of Colour Photography

I’ve read quite a few histories of photography, but they all concentrated on black and white – so much so that you’d think colour hadn’t been invented till very recently! When I saw this one I just had to get a copy – as far as I know there isn’t another book like it. Colour photography actually started a whole lot earlier than I had realised (as early as 1839) and some of these early prints are very lovely. Whether you read it from start to finish, just dip in, or simply look at the pictures, you’ll find something of interest here. It’s copiously illustrated – it’s a big, heavy book with glossy pages and a lot in it. I discovered several photographers I hadn’t heard of before but who have now become favourites, and learned a lot about the difficulties of colour photography in its early days. It was also interesting to see how the colours changed over the years, either because of technical issues or fashion – the soft pastels of the early days, the garish brights of the 1950s, the rich, vibrant, but more subtle colours of photographers like Ernst Haas in the sixties, and beyond.

The Elements of Photography by Angela Faris Belt

This book might not be for everyone and I’ve included it as a bit of a wild card, but if you’re serious about developing your photography (no pun intended!) then I think you’ll find this really interesting. It’s a beautifully crafted and very readable textbook and because it’s based on a college course given by the author, it’s well structured and each section is followed by exercises. It assumes a basic level of technical knowledge and looks at the creative elements that go to make up a good photograph. The author divides the art of photography into four main elements – framing and borders, aperture and lenses, shutter speed, and materials and processes – and discusses the creative options each one offers. There are loads of student portfolios throughout – a lot of them are quite experimental and they won’t all be to everyone’s taste, but if you keep an open mind you can pull lots of ideas out of them. The author wants to encourage a free-thinking approach to photography and if you’d like to stretch yourself a bit then this could be a great starting point.

The Creative Photographer by Catherine Anderson

If the books above seem a little heavyweight to you, try this one for some light relief. I love this book. It’s fun, it’s inspirational, and a real visual treat in itself being beautifully laid out and illustrated. It’s a mixture of practical projects that will get you thinking about how and what you photograph, and have you taking your photos off your hard drive and transforming them into pieces of art you can hold in your hands. There are three sorts of creative exercises – practices to improve your photography and connect with your inner artist, interesting things you can do with your photos using image-processing software, and ‘art table’ projects that turn your photos into crafted items. I’m not usually much of a crafts person, but even I am tempted to try some of these, especially the hand-made book projects. Lots of the craft projects would make wonderful personalised presents for friends and family, too. It’s a fun, inspiring book that’s full of ideas.

Little People in the City by Slinkachu

The idea is simple – take tiny little figures of people (less than an inch high), paint them, position them in urban locations to create a story, and then photograph them with a macro lens. It’s one of those ‘damn, why didn’t I think of that!’ ideas. The resulting images are both funny and touching, and reflect the vulnerability of being a very small person in an overwhelmingly large place – a feeling we can probably all relate to in some way. A toddler with inflatable arm bands swims in the puddle formed on a drainage cover; a father who has just shot a giant bumblebee says to his daughter ‘They’re not pets, Susan’; a man in a suit gazes out over the river and ‘dreams of packing it all in’. Some have a tongue-in-cheek horror element – an image entitled ‘Bad first date’ shows an axe murderer standing over his half-buried victim. Each double-page spread shows you the larger context where the models are placed, alongside the close-up image that tells the story. This is a lovely little book that will almost certainly make you smile, and if you don’t want to buy the book you can see a selection of images on Slinkachu’s website.

So there you have it. I hope you find something here that you’ll enjoy and, if you have a favourite photography book of your own, why not share it with us in the comments section?

Gilly Walker blogs at The Camera Points Both Ways, and if you’re stuck for photographic inspiration, she’s written The Photo Ideas Book – an ebook that will supply you with all the ideas you’ll ever need for your photography.

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