Kat Eye Studio

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Today, in Color (+ a Giveaway!)

After sharing the dramatic black and white landscapes from Avalanche Lake yesterday, I thought I would share what the lake looked like in color. Aren’t those shades of green just amazing? I loved the subtle complementary color contrast of the greenery with the reddish lake bottom, visible through that amazingly clear water. The reflections are nice too!

With all of the postcards flying around the world for the Liberate Your Art postcard swap right now, I’ve been inspired to liberate some of my own art! I’m giving away a set of “Classic Italian Transportation” postcards to TWO lucky winners.

You can enter up to five times! You are eligible for one entry for each of the following:
1. Just because! Everyone can enter at least once.
2. You are a Kat Eye News subscriber
3. You follow me on Facebook
4. You follow me on twitter
5. You follow me on Google+
Please leave a separate comment on this post for each entry by the end of the day Monday, 27 August. Drawing will be done randomly from all comments on Tuesday morning, 28 August.

Yay! I can’t wait to give these babies away! Liberating art always feels good.

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Carved by Ice and Time

I’m back! We returned this weekend from a week spent in northern Montana, exploring Glacier National Park.

Signs in Polebridge, Glacier National Park

To The Park

My husband has been wanting to go there for years, before the glaciers all disappear. There were 150 in the park when it was first explored, and now there are 25 left. Even these have dramatically shrunk when you see the pictures of long ago compared to today.

What’s left is the rocks, the trees and the water. A land carved by ice and by time. And it’s gorgeous…

Bowman Lake, Glacier National Park

Bowman Lake, Glacier National Park

Nature is not my usual subject, and it took a while to get into a groove with my photography. It took a while to get into the groove of this kind of vacation, to be honest. This trip didn’t yield new discoveries, but rediscoveries. The joy of being out in the woods on a trail, hiking. The fun of being in the water on a canoe as a family. The capture of tiny bits of beauty that have been scattered by nature’s hand.

Wildflowers, Glacier National Park

After a few days of walking and looking with my camera in hand, I began to see the colors of the forest. The patterns found in the trees. The lines of the mountains. I found that new perspective I was looking for. It’s always there, when I settle in and give myself a chance to see. I’ll share it with you over the next week or two.

The Photo-Heart Connection link up for July is still open through tomorrow. Come join us!

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I Will Not Take These Things for Granted

Continuing to work on A Sense of Place this weekend, this morning I’ve been exploring the big picture – landscapes and such. I love the expansiveness and peacefulness of this image, from Lake Como in Italy.

As I write this post, one of my favorite songs, I Will Not Take These Things for Granted by Toad the Wet Sprocket, is playing on iTunes. The image and the song are both a reminder to be grateful for the beauty that exists in this world around us, this day. I’ll leave you with the song today.

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Altering our View

I am musing today on Applied Texture over at Mortal Muses, come by and say hello. This image was captured on our day trip to Sirmione last weekend, and I just loved the piece of the castle jutting out into the lake. Beautiful light and reflections, a reminder of an era gone by. Perfect for a little texture to age it.

I love digital photography, for the way it can alter our view. Here’s the original image, before the texture. A different feel, don’t you agree? Which do you like best?

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Castle Views

A craggy castle on the tip of a peninsula, guarding against intruders to a land of days gone by. This castle is in Sirmione on Lake Garda, an hour and a half drive from our home here in Northern Italy. Yesterday afternoon we took a little day trip out to this town, exploring a new part of this beautiful country. Besides this wonderful castle, there is a nice pedestrian town with wonderful lake views, natural hot springs, roman ruins and the most frigid wind coming off of the lake. A perfect afternoon for some of the best gelato I’ve had in a while!

I love these old castles. They are so solid, so real, even today. You can tell that life was not easy in the days these castles were needed. Bare stone rooms, small spaces, dangerous stairways. The majority of the inhabitants worked long hours in difficult conditions, lived in cramped spaces without much reward other than food, shelter and protection from invading forces.

This vision is so different than our idealized version of castles with turrets and princesses with flowing dresses. I find I like the reality of these solid places better than the gilded rooms of kings and queens later in history. There is something honest and true that resonates in the bare stone, coming through the centuries to speak to me in this age. Do you feel it too?

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Exploring with a Camera: Dappled Sunlight

This image fills me with a sense of peace. The greens and blues, the sheltering trees, the path to follow, with the archway leading you right around the corner into the sunlight. It’s a safe, shaded place to pause before moving onward. Beautiful.

This path is part of Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia, where we spent one day hiking along a series of lakes with wonderful waterfalls. Just as spectacular is the path you follow, that winds you along and right up close and personal with the waterfalls or “splat” as they are called in Croat. It was an enjoyable day, a nice break from the cities we had visited to commune with nature and see something new.

I’ve often struggled with getting a good exposure in dappled sunlight images like this one because of the high contrast between full sun and full shade, a common problem in the middle of the day in the summer. Here are a couple of tips for your own explorations of dappled sunlight:
1. In the camera, underexpose. You want to make sure that the bright areas of sunlight on the leaves and the path are not overexposed or “blown out” completely. If that happens, you lose the ability to make any adjustments to those areas later in photo editing software.
2. In your photo editing software, consider two edits (I use Photoshop Elements):
– Adjust Levels to get back the “bright” areas if they were underexposed too much.
– Lighten shadows or Darken highlights to get less contrast between the light and the dark areas. I’ve found the biggest problem with dappled sunlight pictures is that the dark areas are too dark relative to the brighter area of the photo, so if you just lighten them up a bit it looks more like what your eye sees.

For this image, I underexposed a full stop in the camera and then just adjusted levels to brighten the highlights back up, because the exposure was pretty good overall. A small bit of cropping and I was done!

I also played with Pioneer Woman’s Lovely and Ethereal Action for Elements, and I like the depth of color and the dreamy quality this one gives as well. I can’t decide which one I like better!

Try your own dappled sunlight pics, and let me know how it goes! I’ve created a flickr group if you want to share your exploration results called Kat Eye View: Exploring with a Camera. Come join in!

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