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March 15, 2016 by Kat

What We Don’t Talk About

I have a secret. Well, maybe not a secret, but something I try not to talk about here. I try to talk about photography. About creativity, and art. I try to talk about things that will encourage others to engage in art, because I so deeply believe we all need art and creativity in our lives. And I deeply believe that iPhone photography is one of the most accessible ways to create art in our modern world. So that’s what you hear about here.

 

What you don’t hear is the whole story. I try not to talk about how busy I am, how much I have going on between work, and family, and my creative business. I try not to talk about how hard it’s been to find time to create art lately. About how full my calendar is with a teenager in high school, and how much more stressful it is to navigate the ups and downs of an adolescent. Not to mention the projects and travel for work the last few months. I enjoy many great opportunities and challenges in my corporate job, but it all has an impact on my time and energy.

That’s life. 

I don’t talk about it because I feel like it’s something we are all dealing with. It feels like whining. First world problems. These things are all my choice, and I could make different choices. 

But if it’s more than me dealing with it, why not talk about it? Why not talk about strategies for maintaining personal, creative time when busy? Why not discuss efficient ways to grow as an artist, to grow a creative business while meeting other commitments in our lives? Why not open a conversation here, and get more thoughts on how to manage living as an artist/parent/spouse/student/employee/<fill in the blank> in our modern world? 

What do you say, are you interested? If you are, I’ll start talking about these topics more, but I need you to chime in. I need to learn from you too. 

Living a creative life is more than making art. It involves the whole person, living in the real world. It’s time for me to acknowledge that truth. I am more than my art. You are too.

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, creative journey, Creative Life Conversation

January 9, 2014 by Kat

An Exercise in Alignment

Today I want to share with you a simple exercise that has brought me great insight into my personal priorities this week. The beauty of taking a big, long break from my normal plans, as I did in December and early January, is that things look different on the other side. Not only do interesting things emerge, like the new-found interest in painting digitally that helped to create today’s image, but there is also an opportunity to revisit, reassess and reprioritize all of the things in my life with a different point of view.

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So earlier this week, as I sat down in my journal, I came up with this little exercise to look at my needs and my activities and see how they were aligning. Some really interesting insights have come out, which have helped me shed some things and look at other things in a new way. I will walk you through it step-by-step, because you might benefit from it too.

Step 1: List out Needs

The first step is listing out my needs. I consider “needs” those things that I personally must have to be a balanced human being. These aren’t priorities, which are, I think, an externally imposed idea of what I need. These needs are the things that I will subconsciously arrange my activities around, whether I want to or not. If these needs aren’t met, everything is out of whack for me — I’m unhappy, grumpy and awful to be around. Understanding myself enough to identify and categorize these needs has been the subject of much personal exploration and growth over the last few years, so I don’t suggest that coming up with your own list is an easy thing. But when I made up my list, it felt right, and I could see how these fundamental needs drive my choices, conscious or not.

I’ll share my list of needs and explain them as an example. I expect your list of fundamental needs would be different. This list is not in any sort of priority order. They all exist for me, and need to be met.

Physical Well-Being – This need addresses the basics of food and shelter, but also physical health and care of myself and environment. It’s about my physical self, and all that is needed for my body to be well.

Emotional Well-Being – This covers the non-physical essence of me. I named it “emotional well-being” but it includes the mental, spiritual and personal — all of the needs around well-being that aren’t just physical. It’s kind of hard to encompass all of that in words, so hopefully you know what I mean here.

Growth – If there is one thing that I know I need, it’s growth. Growth in any area – intellectual/mental, personal, artistic – I will continually strive for growth in some area of my life. I’m most excited and engaged in life when I am learning something new. If I don’t consciously feed my need for growth, I will unconsciously put myself in challenging situations that force me to grow in some way. I would rather acknowledge my need for growth and choose the path I take to growth, when I can. Then I can observe and learn, not only about whatever new “thing” I am learning, but also about my self, along the way.

Achievement – There is no way around it, I fundamentally have a need for achievement. I am hard-wired to accomplish things. This is another area where conscious choice makes a big difference. If I don’t consciously choose what “achievement” means – both the end goal and the path – then I will unconsciously pick up definitions of achievement externally and strive toward those. There are so many places these can be picked up – parents, teachers, mentors, society in general. This one has been a constant challenge for me, I think partially because I feel like I shouldn’t have this need or I should be able to eliminate it if I don’t want it. By acknowledging that there is this need at my core, however, I’m starting to see that I just might be able to choose the path AND meet the need.

Connection – This is the need for connection to things external to myself. Not just to other human beings, which is the initial and primary way I defined this need, but also to other living creatures, like my pets. I’m also thinking this need may encompass connection a larger idea or movement, but I haven’t thought through that as much. I just know have a need to connect to something outside myself.

Those are my fundamental needs. They feel right, and I can map just about everything I find myself doing – consciously or not – back to more than one of them.

Do you know yours? Try to list them out. This could take several days of journaling, and making and revising lists. I found that I listed a whole lot more things at first and then started to coalesce them into a shorter list as I worked with them.

Step 2: List your Activities

The next step is listing out all of the ways you spend your time, the groups of people you spend your time with, and the activities you do. I listed them out and then found that some of them fell in natural groups. My final list was:
Corporate job
Hiking
Yoga
Art (this contained all of my activities related to art, including teaching, exhibiting, guild activites, etc.)
Family (both my immediate family of husband and son as well as extended)
Friends
Input (this was all of the activities I do around personal growth – reading, journaling, writing, etc.)

What are your activities? As you start to list them out, you may find there are general categories that group nicely together or there are ones that need to remain separate. As you do the next step, you might come back and refine your list.

Step 3: Map Activities to Needs

On a sheet of paper in the landscape orientation, list your Needs along on the left hand side. Leave space between them and fill the entire height of the left side of the page. On the right side of the page, list your Activities in the same way. You might want to use a different color for each activity, or as you draw the map lines, it will get hard to read.

Now, for each Activity, draw a line to each need it helps to fulfill. On the line, write how that activity fulfills that need you mapped it to.

For example, I have a line between my activity “Corporate Job” and my need “Physical Well-Being,” and on the line I wrote “food, shelter.” In a physical sense, it’s my Corporate Job that provides the funds for those things.

Another example, I drew a line between my activity “Art” and my need “Achievement,” and on the line I wrote “completing works, sharing, exhibiting, selling.” These are all the ways that my artistic practice feeds my need to achieve.

Continue with drawing the lines and writing the reasons for the lines until you feel that you have nothing more to add. As you work through each Activity, you may find that you need to go back and add lines for other Activities, because you see connections between Activities and Needs in a new way. You might also find that you want to draw a line somewhere, but you don’t have the right Need to map to. You can add or revise Needs and Activities if you find there is a gap like this as you map.

Yeah, it’ll get messy. Let it be messy and scribbled. The mess is the point. This is the part of the exercise where you are just trying to get it all out on the page — organization and understanding comes later. Don’t put any value judgments on what you are doing. Make the lists, connections and reasons as honest as you can. They should feel right.

Step 4: Review for Insights

This is the part where things get really interesting. There are insights to be found, when you start to look closer.

First, if you had any “aha” moments as you went through the mapping, capture notes on what those where. Maybe you realized that there was a need or an activity missing. Why didn’t you capture it the first time, do you think? What did you feel as you added it later?

Next, look at your map and ask a few questions:
For each Activity, how many Needs does it map to? All? A few? One?
Which Activities map to the most Needs? Are you surprised?
Which map to the least Needs? Are you surprised?
Were there interesting reasons that came out as you drew the lines?
Were there lines that you needed to draw but it took some time to figure out the reason?

This is where the insights lie.

I’ll use the example of my Activity “Corporate Job.” It maps to every single Need on my list. Now, I’ve known for a long time I like my Corporate Job. Even with all I do with my art, I have no desire to leave my Corporate Job. I knew it provided me with things that are different from my Art, but this exercise helped to clarify just how it was meeting my Needs in essential ways. Now, even though it maps to all of my Needs, it doesn’t completely fulfill all of them. But, if the only Activity on my list were “Corporate Job,” I would have a miserable existence because these Needs would only be partially met. That’s why I like working part time, because it gives me the opportunity to have more on my Activity list which fulfill needs in different ways. This exercise showed me how this one Activity fits into the whole for me. I understand myself and my choices better – it’s moved from unconscious feeling to conscious knowing. That’s always a good thing!

Another example I’ll give is on my Activity “Hiking.” As I was mapping it to my Needs, I felt that there was an element that mapped to my Need “Connection.” Since I initially defined “Connection” as with other human beings, that didn’t make sense. But I do fill a greater sense of connection with my dog Zoey when we go hiking, and I get great satisfaction and enjoyment out of that. I also feel a connection to the greater world around me through being in the forest. It brings me outside of myself. So my definition of my Need “Connection” expanded and I see how my Activity of “Hiking” has a broader impact to me as a whole. (Now, if the Activity were “Working out in the Gym,” for me that would only have one line on the map – to the Need “Physical Well-Being.” That’s probably why I’ve never been able to stick to an exercise routine that involves only the gym.)

A final example I’ll give is under my Activity of “Art.” I originally considered listing all of my external-facing art-related activities as separate items, such as Kat Eye Studio, PhotoArts Guild, Corvallis Art Guild, Philomath Open Studios, etc. because they are something specific I do with my time. But after working through this exercise, I realize they are really a subset of my overall activity of “Art,” fulfilling the Need of “Connection.” It all works together.

I won’t go into more detail than that on my results because many of the insights were very personal in nature, but hopefully you get the idea. Take some time with this portion of the exercise. Journal about it, over days if necessary. That’s what I have been doing. I keep looking at the map and finding new things to consider.

Step 5: Make a Plan

Now that you’ve pulled out the insights, you have the opportunity to make conscious and positive changes. If an Activity maps to a large number of Needs and seems essential to you, but you aren’t spending much time on that Activity, then look for ways to readjust your schedule. If an Activity maps to few or no Needs, then consider if you really want to spend your time in this way. Or figure out if there are ways to make and Activity you must do connect to more Needs.

For example, my Activity “Yoga” originally didn’t map to my Need “Achievement.” The yoga I do is incredibly gentle and relaxing, and didn’t initially fit what I think of when I think of achievement – meeting goals and milestones. I mean, I’m not pushing myself to do back bends or headstands or anything. But in thinking about it, I realized I can fulfill the need of “Achievement” by setting a goal for the number of days I attend yoga in a month and tracking. I do have an unstated, internal goal – to go to class every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning I can – so why not track it? Then I meet this Need too, and don’t get the achiever part of me niggling that I’m wasting my time because I’m not “progressing” toward anything. One more line drawn on the map means more confidence and commitment to my chosen Activity.

I think Step 5 of this exercise is much more long range. I’m still doing work in Step 4 and am only starting on making a plan. But I feel I have better insight into how I want to align my activities and needs, and the knowledge to make conscious choices is the important thing.

I hope this is helpful to you! Let me know if you work through this and find it valuable. I never know when I post this stuff if anyone is interested, but I figure if it connects with one other person and makes a difference anything like it has for me, it’s worthwhile.

Have a great day!

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, exercise, my painting, personal growth

January 29, 2013 by Kat

Dynamic Balance

I woke up this morning with “balance” on the brain. You can’t have as many things going on as I do without either becoming a master of balance or spectacularly burning out. Over the last year or so, I’ve done a lot of personal work on balance. Between my corporate job, Kat Eye Studio, my family and my art I have to keep my eye on things. Or, I should say, I have to keep my knees bent and roll with things.

You see, I believe balance is a dynamic thing. Balance in life is like standing on top of a teeter-totter, one foot on either side of the fulcrum. If you want to stay balanced, you have to move and adjust. Constantly. You have to stay agile, moving your body as the plank shifts. You have to ride out any imbalance that comes along to gently bring things back to where you want them. If you try to push to hard the opposite way when things are going one direction, you will most likely find yourself tipping wildly back and forth, arms flailing, ultimately ending up face down on the dirt.

Right now I’m riding a wave of imbalance. This week is an intense week for me at my corporate job. I have a deadline on Thursday for the project I’ve been leading for the last 15 months. Things are going great and the project is on track, but there is a lot of work the team and I are wrapping up before the formal review Thursday morning. It’s taken over my brain. Normally I can switch off work when I’m home, shifting over to my creative projects, but occasionally something big like this comes along. My lesson from the teeter-totter: Time to roll with it.

IMG_3441

So I’m making some adjustments to keep my balance this week. I won’t be blogging or online much the next couple of days. Just like in a photograph, when an element is placed on the extreme edge or corner, you need to leave space to balance it out. I’m making that space here.

Dynamic balance makes for interesting compositions and for a full and interesting life. But you have to learn to make adjustments and shifts, to make things work. I’ve eaten enough dirt, falling from the teeter-totter, to learn that by now.


A few things to make you aware of…

PHC-2013-button-125x125 I’ll be back here on Friday with the January Photo-Heart Connection. Won’t that be a nice way to relax and reconnect to my heart after this busy week! Link up will be open February 1 – 7 for all of you to join in too.

2013-Liberate-Your-Art-Square-125x125 The Liberate Your Art postcard swap is now open for 2013! I’ve moved it earlier in the year this year, to keep it out of the busy summer months. (It will just be in the busy spring months, instead! Hee, hee.) Join us!

A-Sense-of-Place-Button-LasVegas-125x125 Registration is open for the Las Vegas workshop at Selah, which adds you to the Kat Eye Studio weekend of activities. Visit here to see why I’m really excited to teach A Sense of Place this year.

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, mobile photography, my painting, personal growth, tree

March 16, 2012 by Kat

Continuing the Balance

We continue to study the balance of shapes in Exploring with a Camera this month. I’m curious what you all think of this exploration, since there haven’t been too many participants as of yet, which is unusual. What is holding you back?

Today’s image is from Portland, captured after I visited the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago. While visiting the exhibition I fell in love with this painting, No. 8. I sat and looked at it for a long time, wondering what it was that attracted me so deeply. It was partially the colors, but upon further contemplation I realized it was also the balance. This painting perfectly balances color, shape and line. Of course! I would love that in painting, as much as I love that in photography. Mark Rothko’s paintings distill this balance down to essential elements. With his paintings you are not distracted into thinking it is “of something,” as you would be in a photograph. You can see the balance for what it is. I love that!

So, how are you doing with balance? I would love to see. I would also love to hear what you are struggling with, if this topic doesn’t connect with you. Maybe we can explore that together.


Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, blue, Mark Rothko, Oregon, Portland, wall, white

March 15, 2012 by Kat

Choosing the Arrangement

Learning to anticipate the translation of three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional images begins with recognizing that each element gets flattened and becomes … a series of lines and tones that can be rearranged, balanced and played against each other as we play with optics and angles. We arrange those lines and tones within the constraints of the frame.
— David duChemin in Photographically Speaking

Do you see it? The flattening of the frame, the objects as lines and tones. Can you see the basic shapes, and how they are balanced with each other?

If you don’t see it, try it in black and white. Blur your eyes. Do you see the shapes yet? How they balance?

While I am attracted to the complementary color contrast of the yellow and purple in the original image, the balance of shapes works in black and white as well.

I started reading David duChemin’s latest book this morning, and as always his words resonate with me. The quote at the top of the post was especially striking, with my recent fascination, discussed in Exploring with a Camera: Balancing Shapes. This is an important concept to grasp – that the elements in a photograph are not really the “things” you are photographing, but the are lines and tones and shapes arranged within the frame. And, the most exciting part, we as the photographers get to choose that arrangement. We choose what to include and exclude.

Do you see it yet? Does it excite you as much as it does me?

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, black and white, Junction City, Oregon, Photographically Speaking, shapes

March 9, 2012 by Kat

Exploring with a Camera: Balancing Shapes

Welcome to the March installment of Exploring with a Camera! This month I am going to talk about balance in photographs, specifically balancing shapes.

Not too long ago I posted this image of a green door, which I love. After posting it I got to thinking… Why do I love this simple image? What attracts me to photographing scenes like this? Why do I distill the world down into bits and pieces like this? After some thought, I realized that capturing images like this is just plain fun for me, because the compositions are all about playing with balance. I see a scene like this and I get to experiment, balancing the shapes in different ways, seeing what works best to create an interesting image. When I do this kind of play, I’m not only learning how to balance simple 2D shapes within the frame, I’m establishing a foundation that helps me to balance more complex compositions.

So let’s start with this image, breaking it down into the basic shapes and looking at how they balance.

The shapes in this image are the square window, the circular doorknob, and the line of the door jam. (For the purpose of this discussion of balance let’s define a line as a shape.) The square window is my focal point – it is the largest element, has the highest contrast and the most interest with the bit of paint in the window, giving it the greatest visual weight. The door knob and door jam are lower contrast, they are supporting elements in this composition. The empty space is also a supporting element in the composition, providing room for the different shapes to interact. The square of the window is balanced both diagonally in the frame by the grouping of the door knob and door jam in the lower right, and horizontally by the line of the door jam on the right.

This simple example introduces a few important concepts in balance: Visual weight, symmetry and direction of balance.


Visual Weight

Visual weight goes beyond the relative size of an element, encompassing all the factors that affect where our eye is attracted first in the photographic frame. The element with the greatest visual weight will attract your eye first, regardless of physical size. Visual weight could be an Exploring with a Camera topic of its own, so I’ll distill it down to the relevant points for this discussion of balancing shapes. Generally, an element will have a greater weight if it has:

  • Higher contrast with its surroundings. This is not just light/dark contrast, although that is the simplest for our discussion here.
  • Brighter color than its surroundings.
  • Higher complexity than surrounding objects.
  • Unique or Distinct attributes as compared to the surrounding objects.

Typically, you can balance visual weight with an opposite:

  • High contrast can be balanced with low contrast.
  • Bright color can be balanced with neutral or more subtle color.
  • Complexity is balanced by simplicity and space.
  • Unique or Distinct attributes can be balanced by sameness – such as a repeating pattern or open space.

Look at this example of the door above. The bright color and complexity of the door, along with size, give it the greatest visual weight. The door is balanced by the neutral-colored space around it, and the simple line of the black pipe on the left.


Symmetry and Direction of Balance

Symmetry describes how the shapes reflect each other within the frame, while Direction of Balance describes how the shapes interact in terms of balance. A perfectly symmetric composition will have elements that mirror each other, both horizontally and vertically. The direction of balance does not always match the symmetry of the shapes, as the examples below will show.

This image is an example of a completely symmetric composition. The shapes are symmetric in both directions, a mirror image of each other whether you look horizontally (left-right) or vertically (up-down). The focal point shape, the letter slot, is also balanced evenly by the shapes of the door detail in each corner. This type of composition is pleasing and peaceful, but it doesn’t happen often in the real world and would get boring pretty quickly.

A partially symmetric composition will have elements that are either horizontally, vertically or diagonally symmetric. The direction of the symmetry, however, does not necessarily provide the direction of the balance. In this example, there is horizontal symmetry in the shape of the elements in the hull of this boat, but the texture created by the seawater in the paint at the bottom of the frame, the real subject, is balanced vertically by the stripe of dark blue paint at the top of the frame.

In an asymmetric composition you won’t have any obvious horizontal, vertical or diagonal symmetry. You balance between each individual element and their relative visual weights to create a composition. These types of compositions are the most dynamic and interesting. They are also the most challenging, and the ones you are going to encounter the most in the real world. Consider this example. The mail box, my intended subject, is the focal point because of its high contrast with the dark space around it. It is balanced to the right by the window and box of flowers, and below by the siding. The amount of window/box that was included in the frame was chosen intentionally to balance the element of the mail box, the red flower repeating and balancing the red letters and flag on the mailbox.


A Framework for Building Balance of Shapes

While I am out shooting, I don’t necessarily have all of these concepts at the forefront of my mind. I play around with different compositions finding the one I like best, which always seems to be the one with the best balance, even if I wasn’t thinking of balance at the time. To develop a feel for balancing shapes, as you shoot consider these three questions:

  • What am I balancing? This will be your main element or subject.
  • What do I have available to balance? This could be space, or other elements. Distill the elements down to shapes and lines to look for opportunities to balance.
  • How can I balance these elements? Look at visual weight, symmetry and direction of balance. You can balance horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Explore orientation of the frame, either landscape or portrait. Allow some of the elements to be cut off, creating a line or a shape defined by the edge of the frame.

Let’s look at a few more examples of balancing shapes using these questions as a framework. We’ll also keep the ideas of visual weight, symmetry and direction of balance in mind.


What am I balancing? The red mailbox.
What do I have available to balance? The white wall, the blue door, and the numbers on the door.
How can I balance these elements? The red mail box wins for visual weight, because of the bright color and the contrast of the surrounding white wall. It is balanced by the white space around it as well as diagonally by the contrasting numbers in the blue door, and horizontally by the large shape of the blue door itself.

What am I balancing? The colors painted on the wall.
What do I have available to balance? The pipe and attachment, the neutrally painted wall, and the texture of the wall.
How can I balance these elements? The greatest visual weight is the with the painted colors, both for their brightness and the contrast of complementary colors yellow and purple. The contrast of yellow and purple is first balanced by the space of the light purple around the yellow. The bright color on the top of the frame is balanced vertically with the neutral color on the bottom, while the weight of the color contrast is also balanced vertically by the pipe attachment on the wall. The line of the pipe and the texture of the wall provide a continuity throughout the frame that ties the whole scene together. You’ll notice that the photograph has more going on in the right side, both top and bottom. This is balanced by the open space to the left.

What am I balancing? The ladders.
What do I have available to balance? The bright wall, the ground, the sign.
How can I balance these elements? The ladders have the visual weight because of their contrast with the bright wall, the complex shape, and the space around them. The contrast of the ground and the wall is minimized by including very little ground, only enough to place the ladders on to ground them. The ladders are placed to the lower right of the frame, balanced by the sign in the upper left corner. The rectangle of the sign is cropped so that the shape provides the appropriate balance, and only as much text to be relevant and non-distracting is revealed.

It is important to note in all of these examples that a balance is achieved both by how these elements are included in the frame as well as what is excluded. All of these images are a subset of a larger scene. Exploring balance requires a give and take of including and excluding the available elements. (See more on the idea of exclusion in Exploring with a Camera: Process of Elimination.)


Time to Explore

Even when looking at basic shapes in the 2D plane, the topic of balance can be complex. You are balancing shapes, color, contrast and complexity with multiple elements within the frame. If you’re like me, you probably do this naturally and intuitively, but it’s a good exercise to look a closer like this to understand the underlying principles. As you use this framework to play with the simple balance of shapes in your compositions, you can begin to develop a deeper understanding of balance in general. This knowledge will extend beyond simple shapes in the 2D plane to more complex situations and compositions, which are what we usually encounter and photograph.

I look forward to seeing the results of your experimentation with the balance of shapes. Go through your archive or go out shooting over the next couple of weeks looking for this type of balance. Use the questions I’ve provided and the ideas of visual weight, symmetry and direction to help you evaluate the balance of shapes you can achieve. You can link your explorations below. I can’t wait to see and learn more from you!


Filed Under: Exploring with a Camera, The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: balance, line, shape, symmetry, visual weight

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