Kat Eye Studio

by

The Benefits of Space

As we finish up this month’s Exploring with a Camera: Allowing Space, I can see that we’ve all learned a lot. We’ve learned how space can give you room to breathe in a photograph. How the subject can be highlighted and enhanced by the space we allow around it. How a simple, open composition can lead to strong emotional impact.

Many of us have also drawn parallels between our photography and our lives with this exploration. We’ve noticed how allowing space can make room for other things to grow in our hearts and minds. I especially love how Gina put it: “Allowing space in our hearts, homes, and minds is really one of the keys to happiness.” Yes! Whether it’s physical space in our environment, space in our schedule or just space in our thinking processes, it’s all beneficial to us.

Let’s all take a deep breath, allowing space in our bodies as air fills our lungs, and enjoy the benefits of space in our lives, in any way, today. You can still link in your photographs through the end of the day. I’d love to see what you have found in this exploration!


by

Message Received

To put our art, our writing, our photography, our ideas out into the world with no assurance of acceptance or appreciation – that’s also vulnerability.
— — Brené Brown in Daring Greatly

I now know why I needed to hear the message from the universe yesterday. Why I started reading Daring Greatly this week. I’m having one hell of a vulnerability attack at the moment.

Let me explain…

This weekend is the Corvallis Fall Festival. After months of planning and preparing, I’ll be putting my art out there in the public eye, for sale, in a completely new way for me. It’s from the safety of a shared booth (4 other photographers along with me) and the safety of being close to home, but as I wrote out the email last night inviting friends and neighbors to visit me in the booth during the festival, I started to feel the fear. I started thinking, Why am I sending this? I don’t want to bother anyone with more emails. Will they even care? What if they don’t like my work? Maybe it’s better not to tell anyone. But I pressed send on the email anyway, despite my fears, because I know that most of these people want to see me succeed and will come by and support me even if it’s with a quick hi in the booth.

As I was reading this morning I realized where this feeling came from. I’m making myself vulnerable, by putting my art out there in a new way. And no matter how much I want and crave connection with people through my art, I also fear it. No amount of planning and preparing can eliminate that visceral response that comes from somewhere deep inside. The place that fears that I am not good enough. The place that fears rejection.

This vulnerability attack is made doubly strong by my trip to England next week. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been stressing over what to wear for my workshops. I’m realizing now this is just a substitute worry for the bigger fear of putting myself “out there” in such a spectacular way. Want to know how the workshops happened? Earlier this year I said to myself, “I want to go to England and visit my friends! It would be cool to teach a couple of photography workshops at the same time.” And then started working on it. Once again, the planning and the preparing are the easy parts. It’s so, so easy for me to create a plan, a list of things to do, and check them off one by one. It’s a lot harder to deal with the emotions that come along with the actual event. Here I am, travelling by myself, staying with friends I know mostly from online interactions, offering workshops in a foreign country. Vulnerable? You bet.

With every step I take outside of my comfort zone, I open myself up to uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. It just so happens that is exactly Brené Brown’s definition of vulnerability. I get it. I feel it, at my core, right now. Thankfully, these kinds of fears and emotions usually don’t come until I’m already committed, well down the road where it’s too late to turn back, so I keep putting myself out there in new and crazy ways. As I’ve said so many times in my writing here before, each little step you take expands your comfort zone. Whether it’s liberating your art as a postcard or in an art fair, it all takes courage and a willingness to be vulnerable.

I know intellectually that everything will be fine. Regardless of whether or not I sell a lot of my photographs at the festival, regardless of whether or not my workshops are full, I will have a good time. I will learn something in the process. I will grow.

Knowing it will all turn out ok doesn’t eliminate the feelings that exist today, right now, in my gut. But understanding where they are coming from, why being vulnerable has this impact on me, certainly helps. Thanks to the message from the universe yesterday, I was prepared for the panic attack of today. (Sort of. Talk to me about it tomorrow.)

by

Looking Ahead

I’ve been looking ahead to this month for a long time. Looking ahead with some excitement, and some trepidation. Excitement because all of the activities on my plate are good things… my brother’s wedding, Fall Festival, heading to England. But trepidation too because they are all bunched up at once with almost no break in between. Of course, that motivated me to get myself together in advance and get ready for all of this, but it meant I didn’t have space to enjoy the excitement of any one thing.

Today the looking ahead stops, and the experiencing begins. Today I need to allow myself the space to just be in the moment. Tonight we head up the airport, flying out early in the morning for my brother’s wedding in Colorado. The wait is over.

I think perhaps my topic of Allowing Space in this month’s Exploring with a Camera is a little reminder from my subconscious to slow down and breathe. Allow space in my photography and extend that to my life. Yes, it’s a bit of a crazy time. But I can make it crazier by dwelling on it and always looking ahead to the next thing rather than experiencing what is in front of me right now.

That changes today. I’m looking at the here and now instead of looking ahead.

A few reminders, since I’ll be away from the blog for a few days…

  • The Exploring with a Camera: Allowing Space link up is open and ready for you to participate. It remains open through 21 September. This is a very calming exploration, I do hope you will join us.

  • The Liberate Your Art blog hop begins tomorrow! The hop will be open from 13 to 16 September. This will be a fun way to meet more participants in the swap and see more of the liberated art. I’ve been so excited to hear about the different connections that have been made through the swap, it will be wonderful to hear more. I have something extra-special to share with you in tomorrow’s blog post too, so be sure to come by and visit during the hop.

  • Registration is open for the October-November Find Your Eye eCourse series. We have a very nice class forming up! You can find all of the registration details here.

by

Exploring with a Camera: Allowing Space

Welcome to September’s Exploring to a Camera! Today is one of the rare times when Photo-Heart Connection and Exploring with a Camera overlap, due to my crazy September schedule. You can link in to both today!

This month I am exploring space in my photographs. I’m looking at when and where allowing space in the composition creates a more compelling image.

Hot Air Balloons

The balloons at the recent Northwest Art & Air festival were a perfect subject for allowing space. There is an expansive feel of the balloons floating through space. Expansive, peaceful and calm are the feelings that often come from the photographs where I allow space.

How do you allow space? Is space only created by a big open sky? Definitely not! Let’s explore…

What is Space?

Almost every photograph has some element of “space.” Any time you have separation between objects within the frame, there is space. The space I’m talking about today is a little bit different than the emptiness you find between objects, I’m considering “space” as a visual element on its own. My definition of “space” is a single, continuous visual element in a photograph that fills more than half of the frame but is not the subject.

The wall in this image from Korkula, Croatia shows the kind of space I am talking about. The subject is the set of chairs creating an inviting place to rest in the alleyway. The wall is more than half of the frame. The emptiness of the wall both leads the viewer toward the chairs, and increases the sense of intimacy of the little scene.

This example shows that space is not just emptiness. Space as a visual element can have color, texture and variation. There area few ways that I’ve found allowing space is effective in my photographs.

Backdrop

The space in a photograph can serve as a backdrop for the subject. This is a very common way I use space. The example of the bicycle below shows the space as a backdrop. The brick wall has both color and texture, but provides a visual element that is behind and secondary to the bicycle. It is the canvas for the bicycle as a piece of art.

In this next image, the space of the wall serves as both background for the scene and backdrop for the shadow. The space in the photo allows the subject to be the shadow rather than the actual decorative tree. If more of the tree were in the frame, it would draw your eye.

Frame

Allowing space to fill an area entirely around the subject creates an effective frame. The textured yellow wall frames the decorative house numbers in this image, changing the strong color from a distraction to an element that highlights the subject by its contrast.

The blurred background in this image frames the detail of the flowers. Visual space does not have to be a physical surface or emptiness, it can be created through a shallow depth of field which blends different elements into one continuous element. The out of focus field of the background makes the tiny details of the plant more noticeable and dramatic.

Balance

Allowing space in the frame can balance busy elements. In this scene of the food cart, the blank wall allows space that balances the busy detail of the cart in front of the doorway.

The green door in the image below provides the space to balance out the other graphic elements of square, circle and line. Again, notice that the green is not continuous. It has variation and texture, but creates space in the photograph.

Contrast

Allowing space provides a contrast that helps the viewer focus right in on the subject. Along with acting as a balancing element, background or frame, the element creating the space often creates contrast too. The concrete wall in this image serves as both frame and contrast for the window. The color and detail of the window, with its reflection and plant in the windowsill, are emphasized by the lack of color and continuous texture of the wall.

The shape and color contrast of the leaf against the pebbly ground is one of the things that make this image effective. While the wet ground has lots of texture and variation, visually it serves as a background for the red leaf.

Allowing Space

So, how do you allow space? I must admit, I rarely think of allowing space explicitly as I’m framing a photograph. Space often finds it’s way into my photographs when I need to eliminate a distracting element (see Exploring with a Camera: Process of Elimination), or as a byproduct of combining other elements. The lonely bicycle in Bologna is a good example of unintentional creation of space. I wanted to capture both the interesting timeworn pillar and the lonely bicycle. The resulting photograph allows the space created by the empty wall. Effective, but not intentional.

In the image of this fun stoplight near our home in Italy, the space in the image comes from the need to avoid the distractions of the background. Any other perspective than looking into the sky would capture an ugly scene of roads, fences and apartment buildings.

Even though allowing space is not foremost in my compositional toolbox, I have used space to create a feel in a photograph, such as this one from Lake Garda in northern Italy. The space created by the water, along with the framing of the pier as a small, off-center element, provides a stronger feeling. What is your reaction to it?

Space can also create an interesting composition out of a relatively simple scene. The snow-covered spring flowers are interesting on their own, but I think the off-center composition, with the inclusion of the snowy space, makes the scene more interesting.

Isn’t it cool how this simple idea of allowing space can create an interesting image? As someone who often fills the frame, this exploration is a good reminder that sometimes “less is more.” I like the feeling of the images where I’ve allowed space. I’m going to have to use this effective concept more often.

Now it’s your turn to share. Take a look at where and how you allow space in your images, and then go out and capture some new photographs with these ideas in mind. I can’t wait to see what you find when you allow space!


Upcoming Events