Kat Eye Studio

Archives for October 2011

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A Round of Thanks

Colorful flowers and pots in the Corvallis, Oregon farmer's market

Farmer's Market Flowers in Corvallis, Oregon

Now that the website has launched and I can breathe easier, I have a few people to thank for their help in getting me to this point. This was not a solo project in the least!

My graphic/web designer, Eric Zempol of Thick Widget, was fantastic! He was able to take the site I had living in my head, create it and make it even better. While I needed his web design expertise to make the site, his graphic design skills were what I appreciated most. He helped make the site visually pleasing, easy to navigate, updated my logo and educated me in the process. Not only that, he made me laugh along the way. You’ve got to love a sense of humor in the people you work with! I would highly recommend Eric if you are looking for someone to create a WordPress site for you. Thanks go to my fellow muse Holly, aka soupatraveler, for connecting me to Eric.

My husband Patrick deserves recognition for the 350+ blog posts he helped manually edit. Moving from Blogger to WordPress is a daunting task with 715 posts to import! Even with researching and reading and following the best instructions I could find, the posts didn’t import well in terms of formatting. For a while nothing was readable with text and words all overlapping, and an html edit was needed to at least half of the posts to fix the problem. Enter Patrick, who saved the day and edited the html so I could focus on the rest of the content needed to get the site ready. I wouldn’t have been able to launch this weekend without him!

Thanks also go to my friend, writer Munk Davis, for his review of my text and feedback on the writing. I’ve learned the value of editing, working with Munk over time on my class texts, and my writing has improved. He’s a busy guy, so I value the time spent on review of my content. I always appreciate his feedback!

I also must thank graphic designer Renee Rodriguez of Renee Rodriguez Designs. I started the whole website journey by talking to her after I saw a beautiful website she created using the Big Black Bag site. While it turned out that Big Black Bag didn’t have all of the functionality I wanted and Renee and I didn’t work together, she was instrumental in helping me to think about and plan what I wanted in a site. The discussion and pre-work I did with Renee was incredibly valuable as I started working with Eric.

I wanted to take this moment to pause and say thanks to the people who have helped me on this website journey. I couldn’t have completed this project without great people helping me along the way!

Now, it’s time to get focused again on photography. I think I have a few photos to edit and new software to learn around here somewhere…

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Bye, Bye Blogger

Exit of a Chicago el train station

Come Monday, The Kat Eye View of the World will have a new home! It’s time to move the blog and everything else located here to a new location, integrated into my new website: www.kateyestudio.com. Over the weekend I’ll be doing all of the final work to launch the new site and the blog in its new location on Monday. I’m so excited to share it with you all!!

If I do everything correctly with the changes and redirects, this should be fairly transparent to everyone. Not being a full-time web person however, there are likely to be a couple of bumps along the way. You can’t make a change as big as this one without going through some growing pains. I hope you’ll stick with me as I learn the ropes and settle in.

I thought I might be a bit sad, leaving this cozy little place on Blogger that I created over time. But since the words and images go with me, and the new site fits so much better (room to breathe!), the sadness hasn’t materialized. I just feel excitement and a smidge of nervousness for the transition, hoping it all goes ok.

Time to head out! See you on the other side.

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Exploring Texture

Does this image have texture? I think so. Maybe on a larger scale than we normally think of texture, but it is on the surface and brings more interest to the painting of the coffee cup painted on the side of this Florence, Oregon building.

We have finished up the first with of Exploring with a Camera: Found Texture, and as usual, you all have shown how much wonderful texture there is to capture with our cameras. We still have another week with this wonderful topic! Keep looking for texture, and link in below.

Take a few moments to look at the links others have shared, see what types of textures appeal to you. Look at how light and color all work together, when photographing texture. There is so much to learn, when we open our eyes to see. Thanks for joining me!

(And don’t forget, there is a giveaway this time. You enter to win the postcards by linking in!)

FYI - Links will be moderated. Please use a permalink, ensure that your linked image is on topic, and include a link back to this site in your post through the Exploring with a Camera button (available here) or a text link. Thanks!

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At the Threshold of Balance

It’s no secret that over the last two weeks, since returning home from Chicago, I’ve been thinking about balance. I started out by diving into a plan of how to achieve it, but realized that there is a bigger question that has to be answered: What does balance mean to me anyway? I can’t develop a plan for balance if I don’t have a target of what balance looks like for my life.

For me, balance does not mean focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of others. My life is a dance, moving from side to side of the dance floor. Each side has something different to offer, something different it needs. It encompasses so much more than one “thing.” I don’t think there is one word that can capture all of this: Photographer/Teacher/Writer/Engineer/Mother/Wife/Friend. There is no all or nothing.

In my photography, balance starts with deciding what is in and out of the frame before I take the picture. But it doesn’t stop there, it continues as I play around with different compositions and views. I need to remember I’m doing the same in life – experimenting and playing with the elements that make up my life to create a balanced whole. There is no realistic expectation that says we will get it all right and perfect on the first try.  There is no realistic expectation that we will get it all right and perfect, ever. Maybe perfection happens for a brief moment in time, but life is subject to change.

I’m at the threshold of balance right now. Deciding what is in and out of the frame of life. From there I’ll experiment with the details and see how to make things fit in a balanced way. It feels much simpler and freer to think of it as an experiment, where I’m testing to see the outcome, than as a commitment where I “fail” if I don’t get it right.

What does balance mean to you? How do you manage this ever-changing process of achieving balance in your life?

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Chicago & Me

Chicago & Me
We danced a little dance
of lines and curves.
Looking up, up up,
I forgot to look down,
and saw inside instead.
Saw that life
is play
and art
and travel
and friends.
Life is joy
in the moment,
seized.
A camera,
an orange umbrella
are all I need
to be happy.
City of lines and curves,
of light reflected back,
I see Me.
Forgive the random poetry, I’m reading a book of poetry right now and was inspired by the snippets of ideas strung together. These photos were taken at the Cloud Gate sculpture, aka “The Bean,” in Millenium park in Chicago. It was quite empty as I walked past on my way to the Art Institute, and I couldn’t resist a few self portraits with my orange umbrella. The moment just made me happy.

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