Kat Eye Studio

Archives for September 2012

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Brontë Country

I’m in “Brontë Country.” The moors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are very near the town of Hebden Bridge. A short drive away is the Brontë Parsonage, where sisters Emily, Charlotte and Anne lived and wrote their books. Today I went to visit this beautiful countryside, the Parsonage and the town of Haworth with my friend Rhiannon, who came down from Scotland for my visit.

It’s quite a sad story of the sisters Brontë. So much talent, and they all died so young. I think now that I’ve visited their home and seen the countryside, I need to read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre again. There is something about having seen a place that brings a story alive for me.

On a happier note, walking up the hill through Haworth was quite nice! It’s a beautiful street filled with potted plants on colorful doorsteps. I am in my element!

The first workshop is tomorrow. Wish me luck!

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Hello from Hebden Bridge

Have you ever visited someplace new and felt like it was coming home? That’s how I feel here in Hebden Bridge! I don’t know if it’s because I’m back in Europe for the first time since moving from Italy, or if it’s because I visited with several friends today, but I feel at home here. It’s a lovely little town! I love the stone buildings and the colorful doors.

My journey was fairly uneventful and luckily enough the rains stopped before I arrived. There were many places in the Yorkshire area that were flooded and travel was interrupted for many people on Tuesday, but there were no interruptions to my travel on Wednesday. Thankfully, this time Hebden Bridge did not suffer any flooding. They’ve already been flooded twice this year, and you can see the evidence in the storefronts that are being cleaned out and the sandbags at the doorsteps, ready to be put in place.

Well, I’m off to bed… It’s 11pm here. Jet lag hasn’t been a problem for me yet. I wonder when it will catch up with me? Oh, and I tried Wensleydale cheese for the first time today. Yum. Fabulous!

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I’m Off!

Today’s the day! I’m travelling to the UK. I’m off to find out what’s behind the red door of adventure. I’m eager to get back across the Atlantic. This is my first international travel since returning from Italy over a year ago, and I wonder what new things I will discover?

I’ll be blogging from the road, so you’ll get updates here and there about my experiences.

In the meantime, I have a few Kat Eye things to share…

  • I am excited to be the “Flickr Photo of the Month” for masteringphoto.com with my photograph “Scwinn Approved.” You can see it here.
  • Visit Grow Soul Beautiful, a lovely new site dedicated to the mind+body connection of yoga and photography, for a chance to win a space in the upcoming October/November Find Your Eye course series. Also Sherry Galey, one of my participants in the summer course series, wrote a lovely (and unsolicited) post on her experience with the Find Your Eye e-course. I hope you will follow Sherry’s advice and join us for this next journey!
  • This month’s Photo-Heart Connection will be from England. I wonder how that will affect my connection? Join me October 1 through 7 with your Photo-Heart Connection too.

I think that’s it! You’ll next hear from me on the other side. Yay!

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The Journey Continues

Camera. Italy. Me.

These things together may not have been the very start of my creative journey, but they certainly were the things that launched me high speed down the path. Somehow in the last few days I came across this photo in my archives and my heart leapt. There it is, laid out in a picture… cameras, Italia and me. Taken in the Alinari Museum of Photography in Florence in 2011, somehow this image speaks volumes to me about my time in Italy. My creative journey with the camera.

I’ve been back from Italy for over a year and my journey with the camera continues. The Corvallis Fall Festival this weekend was another step along the way. It was a successful weekend for me. Not just in sales (although that part went surprisingly well), but in learning, in getting to know my fellow members of the PhotoArts Guild, and in pushing through my fears of having my work “out there” in the public.

I learned a ton… preparing my photographs for sale, how to set up a booth, different ways of display… the list will continue on. While this was my first year participating in the PhotoArts Guild booth, for the four other photographers it was their second year. They had learned a lot and made substantial improvements to the booth to make it bright, open and accessible. Not bad for what could be begged, borrowed and bought used! We were also lucky to have beautiful weather the whole weekend, which always helps a festival like this.

I also learned that you cannot predict the public reaction to anything. There were certain photos that many people would spend a long time studying, but no one ever bought them. There were photos that generated a lot of interest in the form of conversation and questions, but no one ever bought them. In previous years, cards were the big money maker they told me, but this year fewer cards were sold and more prints were sold. Go figure.

So, how do you know what people want? You don’t. How do you predict and prepare? I’m not sure you can, other than to have a variety of options to offer. Sometimes people come to the festival with an agenda, something specific they are searching for. Sometimes people come to the festival as a way to get out and do something for the weekend, with no intent to buy. Sometimes people connect with the art you have to offer, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have money to spend, sometimes they don’t. Responses to art are subjective. There are too many variables to predict an outcome.

After all of this, you are probably wondering: Will I do it again? Yes. It’s the next step on my journey. And now that I’ve taken the first step, gotten over the initial fears and investment, I’ll continue to move forward down this path to see where it leads. Not at a sprint, mind you, but at the pace that works for me. It was fun!

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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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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.)

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