Kat Eye Studio

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Spaces & Places

I’ve got places and spaces on the brain this morning! This morning I started the “Creating with the Environment” chapter in Trust the Process by Shaun McNiff. He talks about our physical spaces and response to places in the creative process. I love this line:

We create together with our physical environments and don’t always appreciate how their qualities contribute to our expression.

True for any type of artist, but even more so for photographers. For many of us, the physical environment is the raw material of our creation. We capture and compose from the environment. Like today’s photo… While the owner of the house created this beautiful space on the porch to sit and relax, I captured it to share the idea of cheery relaxation with all of you. Someone else created the place, but I create with it too. So very fun.

Since I love to explore and photograph places, my environment has become my creative fuel. We really explored the concepts behind creating with places in A Sense of Place, the 8-week course that just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. It was awesome! I love how much I learn by organizing my thoughts into a class and sharing them with a group. I am in awe of how much I gain from the discussion and interaction with the course participants. This week I read the feedback from the class participants, as they shared their impressions of the class. I get a little giddy sometimes, realizing that these ideas of mine have made an impression on someone else too. You can read a few of the comments, newly added to my class information page here. Pretty darn cool that I can do something I love so much and have it resonate with others too! How lucky am I?

I can’t wait to run A Sense of Place again, in spring of 2013. Until then, I’ll continue exploring the spaces and places around me. They are the fuel of my creative expression. What fuels you?

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Monday Flowers

Happy Monday! The sun is shining and the flowers are blooming here in Oregon. Yesterday I was out exploring and discovered these beautiful orange-yellow flowers scattered various places along the side of the road. I loved how they were intermixed with the different plants growing along with them.

What were you up to this weekend? I hope it involved sunshine and something creative! If you weren’t around, don’t miss out on this month’s Exploring with a Camera, which posted on the weekend.

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Movement of Creative Inspiration

Life is a movement in and out of creative inspiration. The vision must be lost in order to be regained and refashioned. Loss and longing are preconditions of creation.
— Shaun McNiff in Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

A timely quote to read this morning, given my recent brush with low inspiration. When we are in the low parts of the cycle, we forget that inspiration will come back. We don’t appreciate what the down cycles bring us… a renewed and refreshed vision when inspiration comes back.

Where are you in the inspiration cycle these days?

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Renewed

This morning I am feeling happy. Creative. Renewed. I am breathing deeper and feeling relaxed.

Yesterday I met up with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time and visited the Portland Art Museum to see the Mark Rothko exhibit one more time before it ends. After visiting the art museum we wandered a little bit around downtown. I was very sad for the lack of photo inspiration I was finding. I was beginning to get worried. What was wrong with me? Was I in a creative slump?

You see, the last couple of months have been sort of a photo-taking dry spell for me. I had a lot of other activities going on and my creative energy was focused elsewhere. Now that the other projects are finishing up I was expecting the photo creativity to come back. It started to, with my rainboot photo shoot last week. But wandering downtown Portland was doing nothing for me. Something was wrong!

I told my friend I needed something different, so we headed to Northwest Portland. It’s got neat shops, old houses and lots of greenery, and I’ve had success with finding inspiration and even scooter sightings there before. Wow, that did the trick! I came away with some photographs I absolutely love, for the first time in a long while. Today’s image is one of these new favorites and I’ll share more this week.

Not only do I feel happy, creative and renewed, I also feel relieved. All I needed was a couple of hours in a place with texture, color and interesting “real life still life” to capture. Whew. No creative slump after all.

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Wrapping up on Visual Weight

We wrap up our exploration of Visual Weight today! With this Exploring with a Camera theme, have you been noticing how visual weight is a fundamental contributor to great composition? Find the weight, and you find the focal point of the image!

This image from Korkula uses several concepts we discussed in Exploring with a Camera: Visual Weight to bring the focus to the pot of flowers: Illumination, bright color, and off-center placement.

What have you found in your images? You still have time to link in and share with us today! Or, just explore the links below for some great examples of Visual Weight from participants.


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Dissolving Problems

Isn’t it funny how when something comes up in your consciousness, you suddenly notice it everywhere? Like getting a new car. Suddenly you notice how many of the same car are on the road. Your awareness helps you see what was already there.

Last week, when I wrote Focus on the Good, it was unrelated to anything else that was going on for me. Since then, the concept of “focusing on the good” has come up numerous times. It’s coming up in books I’m reading, in conversations with others, and in my own self-examination of things going on around me. I keep seeing how focusing on the good brings me to a better place. It keeps me moving forward, instead of wallowing and getting stuck.

In general, I consider myself an optimistic personality. When I run into a problem, I don’t get stuck. I say, “OK, here I am. What am I going to do about it?” I’m a problem solver. I think you have to be optimistic to solve problems. If you believe there is no solution to something, there won’t be. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But maybe the “problems” don’t always need “solved.” Maybe it’s just a matter of seeing what’s good in a situation, and going with that. I wonder, would the “problems” dissolve away, in that case? It’s something for me to think about. I see some interesting possibilities in the idea of problem dissolving rather than solving. As if maybe, some of the problems aren’t really problems in the first place.

You can see the dandelions as weeds, or as a pretty yellow flower. Your actions will be different, depending on how you look at the situation.

Focus on the good. Dissolving problems. I might be playing with this idea here for a while. I think there is something to it.