Kat Eye Studio

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Looking Ahead

I’ve been looking ahead to this month for a long time. Looking ahead with some excitement, and some trepidation. Excitement because all of the activities on my plate are good things… my brother’s wedding, Fall Festival, heading to England. But trepidation too because they are all bunched up at once with almost no break in between. Of course, that motivated me to get myself together in advance and get ready for all of this, but it meant I didn’t have space to enjoy the excitement of any one thing.

Today the looking ahead stops, and the experiencing begins. Today I need to allow myself the space to just be in the moment. Tonight we head up the airport, flying out early in the morning for my brother’s wedding in Colorado. The wait is over.

I think perhaps my topic of Allowing Space in this month’s Exploring with a Camera is a little reminder from my subconscious to slow down and breathe. Allow space in my photography and extend that to my life. Yes, it’s a bit of a crazy time. But I can make it crazier by dwelling on it and always looking ahead to the next thing rather than experiencing what is in front of me right now.

That changes today. I’m looking at the here and now instead of looking ahead.

A few reminders, since I’ll be away from the blog for a few days…

  • The Exploring with a Camera: Allowing Space link up is open and ready for you to participate. It remains open through 21 September. This is a very calming exploration, I do hope you will join us.

  • The Liberate Your Art blog hop begins tomorrow! The hop will be open from 13 to 16 September. This will be a fun way to meet more participants in the swap and see more of the liberated art. I’ve been so excited to hear about the different connections that have been made through the swap, it will be wonderful to hear more. I have something extra-special to share with you in tomorrow’s blog post too, so be sure to come by and visit during the hop.

  • Registration is open for the October-November Find Your Eye eCourse series. We have a very nice class forming up! You can find all of the registration details here.

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The Black and White Landscape

We got up early. The clouds were low and the morning was quiet as we hiked to Avalanche Lake in Glacier National Park. We encountered a few photographers with their tripods at the bottom of the trail, photographing the falls, but there were few others around at that time of day. It had rained the night before and the trail was damp. The only noise was the sound of our bear bell and the rushing water, when we were near the stream flowing from the lake.

After a two mile hike, the valley opened up into glacier-fed Avalanche Lake. Amazing waterfalls crashed down cliffsides from the glacier invisible above. The clouds reached down and touched the mountainside around us, muting the colors. There were layers upon layers everywhere. In the rock…

Glacier National Park

…and the ridges…

Glacier National Park

…and the mountains themselves.

Glacier National Park

Many of the images from this morning’s hike seemed to call for black and white. I’m normally a fan of color, but I can see how landscapes like these are perfect for black and white. You see the texture and variations in light in a completely different way. I’m not sure that these images are “done” in terms of processing. I edited them a couple of weeks ago and I tweaked them again today. I think I still have much to learn about creating an effective black and white image, but recognizing the possibilities is a start.

Glacier National Park

Oh, and our quiet, misty morning hike? By the time we left the lake, the clouds were dissipating and the crowds had arrived. While we saw almost no one on the hike up to the lake, we saw a steady stream of people on the hike down. We had just beat the rush of people and just captured the clouds as they were lifting. Timing is everything.

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The Dance of Marriage

Today marks nineteen years of marriage for my husband and I. Nineteen years! When I write it out it amazes me. I’ve spent almost half my life with this man. We’ve been through so much together… birth, death, pregnancy, surgeries, depression, degrees, religions, new jobs and businesses, cars, apartments, houses, moves across country and world, travel, hobbies, parenting… I could go on and on. Nineteen years worth of on and on. We’ve been companion, witness, friend and counselor to each other.

It hasn’t always been easy. I sometimes wonder how we’ve made it this far when I look back at the big struggles we’ve had along the way. Marriage is not an easy Saturday afternoon walk in the park. It’s not what the romance novels and fairy tells would lead you to believe. They end at the “happily ever after” part, but “happily ever after” is really where the work begins. Marriage takes compromise and commitment and choice. It takes patience and forgiveness and humility. Recently I heard marriage described as a “crucible for personal growth” and recognized this for truth. It is. You tie your life to a completely separate person and then you progress through the years as you both change and grow. How can you expect to NOT struggle once in a while? Could you ever expect to see completely see eye-to-eye with someone else over a period of nineteen years? I don’t think so.

This weekend I saw a wonderful performance troupe and captured the dancers on the rings and ropes. This man and woman shared an intricate and beautiful performance of a love story. They made it look graceful, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy. It was the practice and commitment they both shared that made the act seem effortless. How many hours and hours did they spend in rehearsal, for this one performance?

Marriage is like that. It’s a dance we must practice and practice with our partner. We make mistakes. We fall. We fight. We pick up where we left off and try again. And sometimes we discover we can glide effortlessly through a performance. We are in synch and beautiful to watch. There it is, the “happily ever after” part. Where things go smoothly and life is filled with joy. When we reach that, guess what? We’re not done. It’s time to learn the next dance, because we are always changing and growing.

Nineteen years worth of changing and growing. We were so young when we got married, it feels like we’ve grown up together. We’ve grown up separately, too. We are both such different people than we were on this day nineteen years ago. Life has changed us. Life together has changed us. We are who we are today, in part because of each other.

I hope we’ll be graced with nineteen more years of the real-life version of “happily ever after.” We’re just starting to get it figured out, for this dance anyway.

Happy Anniversary, Patrick.

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Reflected in my Work

When we create a work of art, we put a little piece of ourselves out in the world. Creation is expression of self; a reflection of self. As photographers, we often capture reflections of ourselves without intending to. Here is one such case for me… I loved the texture of the door and lock in this empty old theater in Astoria, Oregon. In the first image I captured, I was reflected in the door window. I noticed and moved to get another shot without my reflection, but in the end, it was the one with my reflected silhouette I liked best.

When I saw the image, it was a visual reminder that we are reflected in our work. The way we see the world, the things we choose to photograph, even the way we frame them are unique to us. Over time, we create a body of work that is an expression of who we are. We can also see our change and growth over time. It’s pretty darn cool to have that epiphany and discover yourself in your artwork.

I don’t know what my love of capturing old textured buildings and door locks says about me, but I know it does reflect a part of me. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what exactly that part is trying to say.

In The Picture

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Head on the Table

Do you ever have moments of weariness, where you just want to put your head down on the table? Where you just can’t do anything else… you don’t have the capacity for more activity, more engagement, more anything. You just need rest. These moments come from many places… it could be relationship or job stress, or situations outside of our control. They don’t happen often to me, but they do happen.

Friday night was one of those moments for me. We’ve got a couple of big issues going on at my corporate job and Thursday and Friday of last week were long, intense days. They were the kind of days where I come home completely drained because I’ve used up all of my creative energy on managing work. Believe me, it takes a lot for that to happen. By Friday night, I couldn’t do anything more than sit and read a book. And not any book, but a light romance because I couldn’t read anything that took concentration. The feeling quickly passed and I’m back to normal, even though the issues continue and there is more work to do. I’m pretty resilient and adaptable when it comes to this kind of stuff.

When I saw the {in the picture} theme, Facedown, I scratched my head quizzically. I wasn’t really into the idea of lying facedown on the ground for a self-portrait. So here’s my version of “facedown” for this month. That bone-weary, lots going on, head on the table kind of facedown that I was feeling at the end of last week. We all feel this way, once in a while.

In The Picture

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Brain Power

The brain is an amazing thing. Our bodies, our cells, our neurons, the way it all works together is amazing. Over the weekend I read a fascinating book that made me aware of all of this, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD.

It’s a short read, but an amazing story of the author’s personal journey through a stroke at age 37 and her recovery. As an accomplished brain scientist, she has a very unique point of view. There is much important information in her book, about understanding and helping those who have suffered strokes; about the plasticity and flexibility of our brains to adapt. But what she learned about how our thoughts work as her brain came back “online” is the most important, I think.

We have a choice in our thoughts. We have a choice to engage in the negative patterns of our brain and react to the emotions we feel in our body, or not. We can “step to the right” as she calls it, out of our left-brain, rigid thinking into the wholeness and peacefulness of our “right” mind.

Her stroke of insight: “peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.” Later in the book she discusses the different “characters” that come from the two sides of our brain, and how “we can take a more balanced-brain approach to how we lead our lives.”

I so resonate with her message.

It’s as if she experienced from the inside out what I’ve been struggling with the last few years. This idea of balancing the “doing” and the “being.” Balancing the coexistence of the logical, goal-oriented left-brain me with the creative, spiritual right-brain me. There are both there. They both have their place in creating a whole life.

Photography and writing are the things that help me “step to the right” as she puts it. For many of us, I’m sure that’s true. While I’ve known the benefits of a creative practice for a while now, reading this book helped to put it in a new frame of reference with the physiology of our bodies and our brains. Why we might do the things we do and think the thoughts we think, but also the choice we continually have to change our thoughts and subsequently change our whole perspective on life.

Today I’m honoring my body and my brain. Thanking them for the work they do all of the time. Dr. Taylor has made me very aware of how amazing our physiology is, and, more importantly, my role as the consciousness in this body. I get to choose.

I chose this image from San Francisco for today because of the optical illusion I perceive in it. I love how it looks flat! I composed it to look that way and processed it to enhance that perception. Even though our left brain may understand the reality of what we are looking at, we can move ourselves into the right brain and alter that reality by how we frame the world through our cameras. Fun, huh?

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