Kat Eye Studio

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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!


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It’s time to Find Your Eye

Do you have a unique style?

Yes, you definitely do. You may not recognize it yet, but you have a unique vision of the world which shows up in your photography. We all do.

How do you find it?

You connect with your heart, and tap into your soul. You learn to follow what inspires you and discover the threads that already lie in what you create. When you do this, you begin to discover not only your unique photographic style, but how it represents who you are. You gain confidence. You are empowered to express yourself.

You can find a blueprint for connecting to heart and soul through photography in the Find Your Eye ecourse series. Registration for the fall series of Starting the Journey and Journey of Recognition is open now. You can register here.

From Astoria, Oregon. Lightroom Preset for this image will be available for download in the next Kat Eye News.

It never, ever gets old to teach these courses. It always amazes me how unique we all are. I see this as I join the class participants along the journey as a guide and a witness. I love to hear what has come out of the Find Your Eye process for them. Here’s what some recent participants have said about the Find Your Eye e-courses:

Thank you Kat with all my heart. Your course was inspirational and confidence building. Your attention and beautifully crafted responses to each of our individual contributions was much appreciated. It seems each of us have what is needed to be what ever our heart desires, we just needed a facilitator to draw it out.

It’s difficult to say what my favorite thing was about this course because I loved it ALL. But what inspired me the most was the feedback that was given, both by you, Kat, and by the other participants. Sharing photographs, journaling, then getting and giving feedback made it all connect for me. People were genuine in their remarks, honest and open in their journals, and it felt like friendships were being developed with folks from around the world. Like-minded people, interested in finding beauty and meaning with their eye!

This was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done for myself in a very long time. I looked forward to new lessons, interaction from you and my new friends, and to the soul-searching that you prompted us to do. I thought this might be a more of a technical class, but am glad it wasn’t. I did learn more about my camera because of this class, but more importantly I learned more about myself as an artist.

I felt pushed to express myself in my journal and in my photography. I feel the photo and writing emphasis helped me think about my painting and other art work in way that I hope will transform those areas for me, too.

Won’t you join me for the next journey?

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Organic Growth (+ The Winners)

I’ve been thinking a lot about “organic growth” and no, I’m not talking about growing food here. I mention it a couple of times in an interview I recently recorded to promote my on-location A Sense of Place workshops coming up in England in September and October. In the interview (below), I talk about how I learned photography organically. By that I mean naturally and slowly, growing and evolving over the last twelve years. It wasn’t like I set out one day and decided, “I am going to become a photographer!” and take a course of study at a university. I started by creating a few good photographs. Wondering how I could create them more consistently. Buying a new camera. Taking a class. Practicing a lot. Reading a book or two. Taking another class. Taking more photographs. Writing about my photographs. Falling in love with photography. All this over a period of years.

There were some times of dramatic growth, like when I took an online course called Photography 101 in 2007. It covered the basics I had already learned — aperture, shutter speed, etc. — but for some reason this time it really clicked at a deeper level. Even then, it wasn’t a light switch change. It was an evolution over the 8 week course and beyond. Now I can look back on that as a significant “moment” but it really occurred over months.

I think this is an important thing to remember. Growth does not happen overnight. At least natural, sustainable growth doesn’t. Most of the time, it’s a day-by-day journey of growing by millimeters. It’s the sustained growth over long periods of time that gets us to a new place. Like this fantastic rusty mailbox scene found in Astoria… It didn’t appear overnight. It took years for the mailbox to rust, for the ivy to grow. It took years of someone letting this little spot alone to grow.

That’s what organic growth is. Slow, sustainable growth. This applies to photography or business or even personal growth in life. Sometimes, we look at someone we admire, and we want to be where they are now. We want to be that fantastic photographer. We want to be that successful business owner. We want to have that kind of confidence in ourselves. But we can’t get there by leapfrogging all of the work it takes to get to that place. Sure, we can make it easier on ourselves. We can learn from others how they got there. There is so much wonderful information available. We have books and classes and articles and videos all at our fingertips here on the web. But it still takes our own action. It takes practice, and moving ahead, that little step at a time, to get where we want to go.

I think organic growth is the best kind of growth. At least, I’ve discovered that it is for me. It’s the kind of growth that lets me adapt to my environment. It’s the kind of growth that lets me try something out and change course if I need to. It’s the kind of growth that doesn’t commit me to too much, getting into overwhelm. It’s the kind of growth that integrates what I’m learning into a stable foundation, so that each time I take a step up or out of my normal zone the world doesn’t collapse beneath me.

I tell you all this today so that you can be encouraged. That goal you have? The place you want to go? You can absolutely get there. Just don’t try to do it overnight. Give yourself time to grow.

PS – That lovely voice with the English accent you hear in all of my interviews is my dear friend and PR consultant in England, Fiona Pattison. You probably can’t tell because she edited it so beautifully, but we were laughing like crazy as we recorded this interview, over very silly mistakes. Fiona has definitely been an important part of the organic growth of Kat Eye Studio!

And the giveaway winners are…

Out of 107 entries…
#28 Marji of Sun Breaks in the Forecast
#89 Nadine

I’m so excited to liberate these postcards to the lucky winners! Thanks to all of you who entered. I was surprised about all of the nice things you said to me as you entered, that was an unexpected bonus. Thank you for your lovely comments and your ongoing support! More giveaways are definitely to come. Giving things away is so much fun! 🙂

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Reflected in my Work

When we create a work of art, we put a little piece of ourselves out in the world. Creation is expression of self; a reflection of self. As photographers, we often capture reflections of ourselves without intending to. Here is one such case for me… I loved the texture of the door and lock in this empty old theater in Astoria, Oregon. In the first image I captured, I was reflected in the door window. I noticed and moved to get another shot without my reflection, but in the end, it was the one with my reflected silhouette I liked best.

When I saw the image, it was a visual reminder that we are reflected in our work. The way we see the world, the things we choose to photograph, even the way we frame them are unique to us. Over time, we create a body of work that is an expression of who we are. We can also see our change and growth over time. It’s pretty darn cool to have that epiphany and discover yourself in your artwork.

I don’t know what my love of capturing old textured buildings and door locks says about me, but I know it does reflect a part of me. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what exactly that part is trying to say.

In The Picture

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Taking Risks

Risk has been much on my mind lately. You can take risk across all areas of your life: Professionally, personally, artistically. Or you can avoid risk, wrap ourselves up in a cocoon of perceived safety, trying to avoid any downside. But with real risk, there is always a downside, to go along with the upside of real reward. With real risk, something of real value must be put on the line. That could be something tangible, such as money, or intangibles like time, reputation, or even ego.

There have been some big issues at my corporate job, as I alluded to last month, and the situation has only grown bigger as some deadlines loom. This has gotten me to thinking about risk… We are dealing with these big issues because we took big risks. We took big risks, seeking big rewards. When you take big risks, they don’t always work out positively. Were there mistakes made along the way? Sure. Hindsight is always 20-20. Is it a failure that things aren’t working out as planned? I don’t think so. We are still much further along the path to achieving our goals than we would have been. The issues are more about responding to new information as it comes in, rather than completely starting over. The only real failure is if you fail to learn from the situation.

I think of risk as flipping a coin. There are two sides to that coin – heads or tails. There is no inherent “good” or “bad” in a getting a head or a tail, it’s just the outcome of the toss. If we took uninformed risks, there would be an equal likelihood of either result with the toss of our coin. You can move the odds in your favor though, by being smart about taking risk. Smart risk taking involves getting as much information as you can, making a decision and committing to a path. It involves keeping your eye on the situation as you move forward and making adjustments as necessary. Smart risk taking is like working to change the results of the coin toss to be heads more often. But it’s still a coin toss, and it still could come up tails. That’s always a possibility with real risk. If there were no possibility of the coin coming up tails, you aren’t risking anything.

And if you aren’t risking anything, you are not growing. Growth, be it in business or in life, requires risk. It requires stepping out of the comfort zone, moving into an unknown space. Even though I talk about taking “smart risks” and getting the information to move forward, you will never, ever have all of the information you want or you need. If you are taking real risks, you will never have a perfect record in the outcome. It’s called the “unknown” for a reason. You have to take the information you have, along with your desire to reach out for that big reward, apply judgment and intuition, and then go.

We often shy away from risk, because we are scared of failure. We don’t want the discomfort or pain of a “bad” result. So we stay stuck. We don’t move forward, we don’t expand, we don’t grow. We don’t reap any new rewards. We might tell ourselves we are waiting until that next piece of information comes in, for that next door to open up, for the perfect moment to step out… but the reality is there will never be a perfect moment, a perfect opportunity, a perfect decision. While we hesitate and wait, we shrink. We may try to avoid risk at all cost to avoid pain, but life has other plans for us. Life hands us things to which we must respond. Things like health issues, loss of a job or loss of loved ones. We are much better equipped to respond to the pain and discomfort of these unforeseen events if we’ve been pushing ourselves out there, taking risks and learning to deal with the downside.

I’m living the results of real risk right now… At my corporate job with the resolution of these issues, sure, but that’s only one tiny example in the course of my life. There are so many places along my personal journey and career I’ve taken risks and they’ve paid off: Taking the assignment in Italy, sharing my art and my heart here online, starting Kat Eye Studio. Those are just a recent few. If I look back at my life journey, I can see every big, important, positive change in my life has come when I’ve taken a risk. A real risk, where something of value is on the line, and I’ve stepped out into the unknown.

Are you avoiding risk somewhere in your life? Are you stuck, trying to create a cocoon that will protect you from discomfort? I encourage you to take a look at those places carefully, take a deep breath, and flip the coin. Heads or tails, you learn and grow. And with growth, you always win.

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