Archives for January 2013

January 21, 2013 by Kat

The Beauty of Window Light

You might think, from my photographs, I live a solitary existence since people rarely show up in them. Not so. I just don’t turn my camera to people as a subject very often. Long, long ago, as I was beginning in photography, people were mostly what I photographed. That lasted until my son told me he didn’t want to be photographed anymore (he was maybe 6 or 7?) and it was hard to find other subjects to practice with. I discovered stationary objects could provide a perfectly interesting subject, and they didn’t whine, either! I very quickly shifted away from photographing people to other things, and never looked back.

So I was a bit out of my comfort zone this weekend as I took a two-day class from photographer David Paul Bayles in “Creating Expressive Portraits with Window Light.” All learning is good, right? That’s what I thought as I signed up for it last November. I wasn’t quite so excited for the class as I ended the day Friday, tired after a low energy week, and just wanted to spend the weekend being lazy. But I had paid and my friends were going, so I wasn’t going to bail out. It turned out to be a fantastic weekend! I learned so much. There is a ton of new information floating around in my brain this morning… key light, lighting patterns, light modifiers. New words like gobo, scrim, flag. Thoughts on posing and positioning and engaging the subject. It’s amazing how much has to come together for a good portrait. I have soooo much more appreciation for portraiture after this weekend! I will be looking at every portrait I see very closely to understand how it was created.

I also have more appreciation for those who find themselves on the other side of the camera lens. All of us students had to take turns being the model for the other photographers in the class. It’s ironic that two weekends in a row I found myself staring into the lens, when I so studiously avoid it in normal situations. But it is good to be on that side of the lens too, understanding how it feels. As the one being photographed, you really want direction and to know the photographer is working to make you look your best. You want them to be confident and engaging, so you are comfortable. You don’t want them to be fiddling around or seem unsure of what they are doing. As the photographer, you have to do all of this while getting the technical settings and artistic elements right. Whew.

Here are a few of my favorite photographs of the weekend, posted with permission of the models, my fellow photographers and teacher in the class. These are pretty much straight out of the camera, just cropping on a couple of them. All of these were taken with window light, and in some cases a light modifier of some sort.

In this assignment, we were working on lighting patterns. Meet Helen, with a Rembrandt lighting pattern (almost) in low key. Isn’t she gorgeous? This was really beautiful light for her. This was a dark room with only one light source, a full-length glass door. Several feet behind her was some purple fabric on the wall. An assistant (the instructor) was holding a flag to block the light on her chest so the focus was on her face.

Here we have my friend Jeannette, in a “open” assignment where we weren’t looking for anything specific, just a good portrait in good light. My goal was to create a portrait that focused on her amazing blue eyes. She is sitting on the floor facing a large bank of windows (above her), with other windows on either side of the room. The background was carpet.

For our assignment on incorporating hands into a portrait, I worked with the instructor, David. I loved his hand gesture on the face, and how the light was just perfect through his fingers to keep a catchlight in his far eye. He is sitting angled toward some very large two-story picture windows in his studio, and several feet in front of a plain black cloth background. This is my favorite portrait of those I took over the weekend.

Our final assignment was to create a self-portrait. With dark hair, I’ve never been able to get a good self-portrait with a dark background, so that’s what I wanted to work on. In this one, I’m using the same full length door in front of the purple fabric from Helen’s portrait earlier, but I also reflected some of the light from the door onto the background to give better separation of my hair from the background. I did this by propping a reflector up against a folding chair off camera, to the left of where I was sitting. Kind of fun to be able to figure this all out! I still have more to work on, David pointed out a few things that I could do to improve it, but I couldn’t have created anything like this on Saturday morning before the class started. I’d say that means it was a successful class!

I still have much work to do to get this all down to the point where I’m not the fiddling photographer making the subject uncomfortable. But at least now I have a much better idea of where to start. I do need practice though. Anyone want to come model? 🙂

January 18, 2013 by Kat

Blurring the Lines

So, how is it going with capturing Artistic Blur in-camera this week? It’s been a fun exploration for me! I’ve spent a couple of mornings this week working with blur. As I mentioned in the original Exploring with a Camera post… lots and lots of throwaway shots for the one or two good ones. I did get frustrated a couple of times but then I remembered what I told you all, and had to tell myself too!

Ghost Tree

I spent most of my time playing around with the Slow Shutter Cam app, because I was must successful with getting blur that way. I spend a lot of time playing with getting blur around a mostly recognizable image. To do this, I set my shutter speed to 2 or 4 seconds, held the camera (mostly) still for at least half of the time, and then started moving.

The kind of movement changes the effect. Above, I had a swoosh to one side and must have sat in a new place to get the “ghost tree” effect. Below, I bounced around a bit instead of having a single direction of movement.

The image above wasn’t the final image though. I wanted to show you the in-camera blur (above) but this image was calling for more. So even though we’re focusing on in-camera blur, I want to show you the finished piece with a texture and a frame added. They also add to the soft feel of the image. More on post-processing next month though!

And… drumroll please… I did manage to get out-of-focus blur with the iPhone. Once. It was completely by accident and I can’t do it again! Argh! So I’m still working on that skill. Here it is, straight out of the camera:

How is your exploration of Artistic Blur going? Share with us!

January 17, 2013 by Kat

A Lesson in Simplicity

Hello and happy Thursday! It’s been a busy week for me. Lots of little loose ends to tie up, much of it has seemed to center around prep for exhibitions and framing. Someday, when I get framing all figured out to my liking, I’ll share what I’ve learned. I’ve got creating and printing under my belt now, but framing! Ugh!

For this week’s Paint Party Friday post I wanted to share one of my favorite recent paintings, Reaching Toward the Sun, and the little lesson I learned from it. This one is a lesson in simplicity.

Reaching Toward the Sun

It all started on a crisp and sunny Saturday afternoon. Walking back from a relaxing visit to the local coffee shop with my son, I noticed these wonderful dead plants along the path. They were so lacy and delicate, standing tall in the sun even after they had lived their life, I had to play. I spent a while trying to capture their beauty, sending my son on home ahead of me because he was getting bored waiting. It’s nice to have an older kid now. 🙂

Composition was challenging with a fence and convenience store right behind the plants, but isn’t that always the way of photography? Sometimes you have to work for that perfect shot. Of the bunch, I loved the gently curving lines of the stalks and the way the sun highlighted the details in this one:

OK, so now it’s time to play. I’ll walk you through some of the different options I tried:

The blue sky in the original was pretty but a little too blue. I wanted to soften up the color but still keep that glowing sun. I played around with several options in Snapseed (top row). When I come across an effect I think I like as I play, I always save the image to the camera roll. I have no idea if I will use it later, but I want to remember as I’m playing what came before. You never know what you might want later!

Next it was time to play with effects. The first two in the second row were from the original photo processed through decim8, a really cool app that creates interesting modern/digital effects, but it was not what I was going for with this piece. I needed soft!

So then it was into the painting apps. All of those shown are from Autopainter HD or Autopainter II. I tried painting with both the original photograph and the edited blue-green photograph. I liked the blue-green ones the best. (There are more painting experiments in my camera roll, I could only fit a few here.)

Now that I had some good options and ideas for direction, I pulled the blue-green image into Image Blender and started to play.

It quickly became obvious that the seed head at the bottom of the frame, which hadn’t bothered me in the original photo, was just going to be a distraction in the final painting. So I pulled the blue-green image into TouchRetouch and quickly edited out. This is a super simple app that works great for quick corrections like this. Doesn’t that look better?

Now that I had a new photo, I needed to go back through and recreate the painted layers. Since I had already narrowed down my direction through earlier experimentation, I only recreated a few of the layers that I thought I might want to use, and started blending.

The first blend I did was the blue-green image with this watercolor layer:

And guess what? That first blend became my final image:

Reaching toward the Sun

After playing some more I realized that first blend captured exactly what I wanted, the soft colors, the sun on the stalks, with the gentle, painterly feel. It was a lesson in simplicity. After spending the last few weeks blending many, many layers to finish a piece, I realized sometimes you don’t need that. Something simple will do. Just like every photograph doesn’t need to become a digital painting, every digital painting doesn’t need to be complex. The experimentation was all good though, it helped me refine my artistic vision and really be clear about what I want to communicate in the final piece so I could make choices accordingly.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s lesson in simplicity! It’s also this week’s “mobile tutorial.” I’ve created a page on the blog sidebar under the Resources heading called “Mobile Apps, Tutorials and Resources” and you can find a link to all of these little tutorials there, along with some web resources and (eventually) a list of apps I recommend. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers as I’ve explored this new medium and I want to make it easy for you to find the information I’m sharing as I learn. Let me know if you have any questions. Maybe the answers will pop up in one of these posts!

January 16, 2013 by Kat

Join me in Vegas this Spring!

So, have you been wanting to dedicate a weekend to photography? Maybe get away for a day or two? I’m coming to Las Vegas this spring, and I want YOU to join me!

Selah {an art salon} is opening in Las Vegas and they’ve invited me to bring the 1-day workshop A Sense of Place to their creative studio. I’ll be teaching there on Saturday, April 13th. Yay! You can find out the details on their blog here.

But wait, there’s more…

You can get inexpensive flights to Vegas from anywhere in the country, so it’s the perfect place for a weekend getaway. Let’s make a weekend of it! Register for the A Sense of Place workshop at Selah, get yourself to Vegas, and then let’s add some fun activities and make it a Kat Eye Studio weekend from April 12 to 14. Here’s what I have in mind:

Friday Night: Evening Photowalk. Hello, Night Photography! Could there be any better place to capture the lights of night than Vegas? Let’s have some fun!
Saturday: A Sense of Place workshop at Selah, 9am to 5pm
Saturday Evening: No-host Dinner. Let’s relax after our workshop day and have a great dinner together! I bet we have a lot to talk about…
Sunday Morning: Coffee and Critique. We’ll meet for our morning coffee or chai, and talk about what makes a good photograph. Bring a print of your work!
Sunday Afternoon: A visit to a gallery or art museum? Another photowalk? What do you think we should do? I’m open to ideas!

I will let you know when registration opens on Selah site and will keep you posted on the weekend details as they firm up.

So, what do you say? Want to join me in Vegas???

A quick note – Today is the last day to register for the Find Your Eye: Journey of Fascination eCourse series. Class starts January 20.

January 15, 2013 by Kat

In Front of the Lens

Dreaded words for any photographer to hear: I need a headshot of you.

My heart starts to beat faster. My palms get sweaty. I want to answer, Don’t you know, I’m the photographer? I’m supposed to be behind the camera?

Alas, I can’t avoid it. When you are in business teaching photography you have to show your face once in a while, and a headshot is necessary. And it was time for me to get some PR photos done that weren’t my own selfies.

So in 2011, after seeing the great portraits taken by local photographer and friend Jones Oliver at the Help Portrait event, I asked him if he would do some portraits for me. He said, “Sure!” We even met to chat about it once or twice to discuss concepts. And then I put it off, and put it off. And conveniently forgot about it. Until last week I got a request for a headshot and I knew it was time. I could no longer put it off. I emailed Jones in a panic, asking how quickly we could do this, and he was fantastically willing to do it on short notice over the weekend.

So here I am, saying hi to all of you, thanks to Jones:

I think the key to being in front of the lens is finding a photographer you are comfortable with. I know Jones, he’s a personable and funny guy, and just knowing that helped me work through the awkwardness of being in front of the camera. He was doing his best to make me look… well, like me. Because that’s what I really wanted. I didn’t get professionally styled or made up (make up? what’s that?), because that’s not how I really look.

After we got the requisite headshots, we did some playing. I wanted a “hold the photograph out and have me blurry in the background” shot. Jones pretty much required a scooter to be in this photograph, as that’s “iconic Kat” in his mind.

Then it was out into my latest habitat… among the trees. It was a cloudy, overcast morning but it started to clear up as we got to the park. Not the most ideal situation for portraits but we worked with it. Here are a couple of my favs…

And, for the grand finale, Jones had this idea of blending a photograph of me taking a picture of trees into one of my pictures of trees. After discussing it, we ended up with this piece. His photograph, and my edit of the tree, blended together. I love it! It’s me and my art, together in one image.

This whole thing taught me that if you have the right photographer, the experience of being in front of the camera can actually be fun. Sure, I still notice my flaws in the photographs, but in these they don’t seem to matter quite as much as normal. I mostly see me.

All photographs in this post are by Jones Oliver. Be sure to check out his blog, Camera 47.

January 14, 2013 by Kat

Living with my Work

From photons to pixels to print – same day. One of the things I love about being able to print my own work is that I can, almost real time, print the work I am creating. Often I create something and love it so much I just want to enjoy it off of the computer. Or, I tried something new and I want to see how it translates to paper. I want to hold it in my hands, feel as well as see the texture. I can do that now that I have a printer.

A couple of months ago, I started a weekly “print practice.” My goal is to print one or two pieces a week, to get better at editing for print. Get a feel for the effects of different papers and really learn this part off the process. I’ve stuck with it most weeks, and I’m definitely I improving. I really love my prints.

The problem became how to display them. I thought about my magnet boards, but they are really not big enough to hold multiple large prints. I have a bunch of old frames in the garage, but they would need some repainting to match my studio and they are standard sizes. I would either have to start printing standard sizes or get mats. The thought of changing things out of mats and frames all of the time wasn’t appealing either.

So it was synchronicity last week that when I finally put away my painting easel and created some free wall space, I ran across these magnetic photo ropes on Photojojo. I bought three in red, on a whim, hoping they would work in the newly empty space.

They are awesome! I can print and hang within seconds, easily changing images out. Each rope comes with eight super strong magnets, which work great even for the heavy fine art papers I’m using. It’s still a clean, uncluttered look, even with many images on display.

Now when I sit in my comfy chair, this is my view. Nice view, huh?

I’m already learning a lot. It’s interesting to see how some images, loved in the moment, quickly fade away and I want to replace them. Others last longer. Some images don’t translate well from screen to paper, or need a little more work to translate well. After looking at them in different light I can see how I might need to adjust them. I’ve already changed up what’s displayed here several times in the last few days. It looks different this morning than it did when I took these images on Saturday.

In David duChemin’s workshop he encouraged us to “live with our work.” I understand why. We are more picky, we improve, when we have to look at it every day. How do you display your work?

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