Kat Eye Studio

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Momentous Work

I truly believe that ignorance is bliss. I believe there are times starting things without a clue as to the work involved is a good thing.

Being full of uneducated optimism, we start down a path. We don’t ask people who know, who have followed this path before, because they might say, “Wow, you have no idea what you taking on.” And they might tell us, and burst our bubble. Or if they do tell us, we don’t listen, being so full of our wonderful idea.

Bringing an idea into the world, whether it be a novel or a business or a painting, is hard enough work without knowing the full extent of the effort. Having the courage to take things on and start, one little bit at a time, can sometimes seem momentous on its own. Once you are caught up in the wave of creative expression, you find you believe in your idea and want to make it work, at any cost. You are willing to surmount any obstacle to get it done and out in the world.

I’ve learned a small piece of this truth lately, with my Find Your Eye class. I’m celebrating a little bit this week because I finished the final edits on the course two days ago. Yes, the class has already started, we are in week three. No, my schedule did not go as planned. “Finishing” ended up being much more work than I expected. Than my family expected. Most of my free time in the last month was spent in editing, rewriting and finalizing the material. Considering I work full time, have a family and we travel quite a bit, that was limited time.

Would I do it again? Absolutely, in a heartbeat. I am so proud of how the material has come together into a cohesive whole. I am loving the class, seeing these ideas and tools in the hands of new people who are finding value in them. I know that this was the right thing for me to do.

Would I have started, had I known the real work involved? It’s hard to know, but I suspect not. If I had known I would give up so much of my precious free time in Italy for this at the outset, I might have thought, “Oh, I’ll just start that when I move back to Oregon.” The problem is, I needed to do it now, while the ideas where real and fresh to me. So, like any starry-eyed person with an idea, I started without knowing the effort involved.

I believe that this is one of life’s little tricks, to allow us begin on a path without knowing the full extent of work we will have to do. It may be the only way to get us invested at the outset, so that we bring new, good, amazing ideas into the world to share. If we truly knew the cost, we might stay on the couch and read a book. Instead, we create.

Ignorance is bliss. I’m a firm believer. How about you?

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Capture the Sky

I have been fascinated with skies lately. Whenever I am out and about, I find myself capturing a few images of mostly sky. Maybe just a little bit of something else, to ground the image, like this tree in silhouette.

There is so much possibility in the sky. It’s wide open, too big to capture it all with the camera. I can only capture little glimpses, enough to give an impression. The glimpses are so fleeting, as the sky is ever changing. The clouds and the light do not hold for any photographer, I have to catch what I can.

I am once again reminded of the Spiral of Creativity by this image of the sky. We do the best we can to capture the fleeting inspiration that comes to us, and pull it into our spiral. We figure out how to make this transitory and insubstantial thing, this idea, into something real. For all of the giant, expansive nature of ideas, we have to break them down. Frame them into something manageable in order to proceed.

Turn an idea into a manageable plan. Capture a piece of the sky. It’s all the same thing, and about as easy to do either. Yet, I am challenged to continue trying. Maybe, just once in a while, something great comes out of the effort. Something I can share with you.

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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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Dramatic Cropping

Today we are going back to the Rhine River Valley in Germany, to the town of Bacharach. This image has been in my file waiting to be shared for ages, and today it won’t leave my head. Isn’t it a beautiful scene? So “German,” with the timber-frame house. So “Rhine River Valley,” with the grape vines growing on the hillside behind. So summery, with the sun, the green vines, and the flowers. This house is the Altes Haus, one of the oldest timber-frame houses in existence, built in 1368.

Take a moment to look below at the original image. It’s just ho-hum. A little overexposed in the sky and the composition doesn’t do anything for me. It’s amazing what cropping can do. Reducing the extraneous information improved the image. I don’t normally crop my images this dramatically, going from vertical to horizontal, but look at the difference!

This morning I’ve been considering what “cropping” I need to do in my life, so it should be no surprise to me that this image comes to mind. Where am I filling my time with extraneous things? Am I spending my energy in places that aren’t moving me in my chosen direction? It is easy to get into a cycle of do-do-do. To join activities because they sound fun without ever considering everything else that you have going on. Ignoring the time and energy loss that being overwhelmed can create. Even if you don’t follow through on the activities, the mere guilt or remorse of having joined and not taken action can drain us.

Today I ask you to consider, is there something that you need to crop from your life? What would make your personal “composition” better, just by trimming a little extra away? Like a photo, where you have no guilt whatsoever about removing extraneous information, just decide and let it go. Focus on the part that makes the image, your life, a healthy and complete whole.

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Just the Outline

I am musing on silhouettes over at Mortal Muses today. Come by and say hi!  This photo and its companion on Mortal Muses are from the Lisbon Aquarium. I love how it tells a story, in just blue and black.

If you missed it yesterday, the linky to Share Your View on Linear Perspective is open. It will remain open all week, so continue to play with this fun concept and come back to link in.

Happy Friday, have a great weekend!

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Share Your View: Linear Perspective

So, after last week’s Exploring with a Camera: Linear Perspective post, have you been seeing diminishing lines everywhere?  I have! As I was going through photos of our recent trip, this one from the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid caught my attention. Art museums are so wonderful for their lines and wide open spaces. Many museums do not allow photography, but I love it when they do. I have to laugh at the memory of taking this picture. As I was shooting it, a guy walked by and gave me the weirdest look. I could practically read his thoughts, “You are surrounded by all of this famous art and you are taking pictures of a hallway?” What he must not have realized, is that I’m creating my own art.

As I was editing this image, I found it interesting from a compositional perspective because it was not symmetric even though it initially appeared that way to me. There is a top to bottom symmetry in where the vanishing point is placed, but that is it. The walls in the foreground, the windows on the right wall, and even the track lighting on the ceiling create a little more visual interest than if it were perfect symmetry.

But enough about that, it’s time to Share Your View! Did you take any new shots using linear perspective this week? Did you find any in your archive you could share? There are so many different ways to use linear perspective, I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve captured.

Link in below!