Kat Eye Studio

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Silent Communication

There is a moment when I feel the forest in my body. When I step out of the car at the trailhead, the change is palpable. The quiet is immense. My soul breathes a sigh of relief.

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It’s a different kind of communication, between my heart and the forest. It’s one of the senses. Hearing the quiet between the sounds of the birds twittering and my boots along the path. Feeling a gentle breeze against my skin, or the cool wet of misty rain, or the warmth of sunshine. Smelling the new growth of the earth or scent of spring blooms. And seeing, my primary sense, is enhanced. Seeing what is and what could be, through my camera’s lens. Feeling the abundance of having so much to photograph I can leave most of it alone, and only stop for what truly moves me.

As I sit here writing this I’m struck by the contrast in sound the most. It’s early morning and I’m the only one awake, but the house is not quiet. There is the ticking of the clock. The faint high-pitch whine of the computer. The whir of the refrigerator. The spit of sprinklers turning on in the yard. Trucks rumbling along the nearby street.

Maybe that’s why my soul breathes such a sigh of relief at the trailhead. I must need the quiet of the forest. Stilling the sounds of everyday life for just a little while, so I can hear my true thoughts and desires well up from deep within.

Shhh… What do you hear?

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Silent Communication

There is a moment when I feel the forest in my body. When I step out of the car at the trailhead, the change is palpable. The quiet is immense. My soul breathes a sigh of relief.

20130521-061130.jpg

It’s a different kind of communication, between my heart and the forest. It’s one of the senses. Hearing the quiet between the sounds of the birds twittering and my boots along the path. Feeling a gentle breeze against my skin, or the cool wet of misty rain, or the warmth of sunshine. Smelling the new growth of the earth or scent of spring blooms. And seeing, my primary sense, is enhanced. Seeing what is and what could be, through my camera’s lens. Feeling the abundance of having so much to photograph I can leave most of it alone, and only stop for what truly moves me.

As I sit here writing this I’m struck by the contrast in sound the most. It’s early morning and I’m the only one awake, but the house is not quiet. There is the ticking of the clock. The faint high-pitch whine of the computer. The whir of the refrigerator. The spit of sprinklers turning on in the yard. Trucks rumbling along the nearby street.

Maybe that’s why my soul breathes such a sigh of relief at the trailhead. I must need the quiet of the forest. Stilling the sounds of everyday life for just a little while, so I can hear my true thoughts and desires well up from deep within.

Shhh… What do you hear?

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This Way

I believe each and every one of us know deep down in our hearts the direction we want to go. It might be a secret longing, but we know.

The problem is, we let other things get in the way of moving that direction… Be it our fears or doubts or other commitments and responsibilities. We often spend our energy coming up with reasons why we can’t follow the path our heart sets for us, instead of spending energy removing the roadblocks or starting out along the path.

It often takes something bigger, a crisis to nudge us over those barriers and along the path. Sometimes we need the obvious arrows pointing the direction we need to go.

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I was reminded of this as I hiked in the woods this week. I’ve been longing to hike on a regular basis for months. My heart has been yearning for this quiet time in the forest; my body has been asking to be moved. There is a happiness and contentment I feel when I get out and hike which spreads out into the rest of my life.

I started to rearrange my schedule and responsibilities so I could get out regularly months ago, but then I let other things get in the way. I made excuses and distracted myself. And then my shoulder started hurting, which became the arrow pointing me along the path in the direction my heart was already telling me to go.

My heart knew all along what I wanted. My body and my head knew too. Why did I have to wait until there was something painful to make the change? I’m looking closely at this, to see what I can learn.

Do you know where you want to go next? What is your heart telling you to do? Maybe it’s as simple as mine, walking in the woods. Maybe it’s something bigger. What can you do to move in that direction now? Look at what you need to rearrange, what you need to change, and start down the path. If you don’t, you might find an arrow or two appearing, making sure you know the way.

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Inhale Spring

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I inhale
Fresh scent of spring
Tickles and tingles my nose

I exhale
With the earth
Matching her breath through branches

I step
Along hard-packed earth
Winter’s mud only imprints in my path

I blink
Flashes of sun
Revealing forests of white petals

I see
Joy in sunshine
Leaves sprouting with wild abandon

I pause
One last tree
Waiting sheltered in earth’s shadow

Not long now.

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A Walk in the Woods

I woke up Monday to the sound of the rain. It figures, I thought to myself, It would be raining the first day of my new plan to go hiking regularly. But this is Oregon, and if you didn’t ever go out in the rain you would be stuck indoors for months, so I got out the rain gear and headed to the woods.

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It was everything I had hoped for: peaceful, beautiful, solitary. Oh yes, and wet. But the sun came out several times, and I experienced a true joy to see the light dancing among the trees. Had I stayed at home, I wouldn’t have noticed the sun.

By the end, I was breathing deeply. My shoulders had relaxed, coming down from my ears to a more natural location. My body was tired but refreshed.

This is what I’ve been craving. It was hard to break the habit and walk away from the computer and the To Do list. But Day One of Project Forest Walks was a success. Today will be Day Two.

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Adding Bokeh Blur

How’s it going with the post-processed Artistic Blur? Let’s check in on this month’s Exploring with a Camera, and see what you all have going on.

I must admit, I haven’t done a whole lot this week! I’ve been working on taxes. Ugh. My Mom arrives for a weeklong visit this morning, so I’m trying to finish it all up and remove these various piles of documents I have sitting around the house. My eyes have gone blurry, even if my photographs haven’t…

I did get a chance to play a little bit with adding background blur in post-processing apps this week. There are quite a few apps out there that add bokeh or blur effects. I have to admit, I’ve always thought adding bokeh blur after the fact to simulate depth of field can be kind of creepy. My eye has been trained to know what real depth of field should look like, and often the post-processed effects don’t match up with reality. Do you find the same?

With the depth of field limitations of the iPhone camera though, it’s nice to understand where I might be able to affect things, so I played around with the Bokeh Lens app, which I had downloaded free a couple of weeks ago. After trying it on a few images, I realized that in order to add this kind of blur in post-processing you need a situation where the distinction of sharp vs blurry would be obvious even in camera. A single object significantly in front of a distant background would work the best.

Enter this image, from a hike last Sunday. I love the “eyes” of the tree but realized my focus was off, with the sharpest thing being the tree behind the face tree. It’s a reminder that while the iPhone camera does not allow for a lot of depth of field, it does have SOME and you still need to get the focus in the right spot. In addition to focus, the contrast and relative isolation of that second tree kept pulling my eyes away from what I wanted as the focal point tree, the one in front.

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Next step, blur the background in the Bokeh Lens app. The way this app works, you set the amount of blur you want, and the whole image is blurred that amount. You then mask off the area you want sharp, so I painted the mask on the foreground tree with the face. Not bad so far, huh?

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After using any new app, I check the resolution using PhotoSize, to see if it saves full resolution files. You can’t tell just be looking at an iPhone or iPad screen whether it’s a high resolution image or not. Unfortunately, this app does not save full resolution or even medium resolution. It’s very low resolution, with no settings to change it. To get a decent resolution file for later use, I needed to blend the blurred image back with the original image to get an image. Blending the blurred image back with the original image gave some dreamy effects in the background, which I liked. I find the dreamlike quality of the background adds to the feeling of the forest watching you provided by the face in the tree. With a bit of color editing to add to the dreamy feel, here’s the final result:

The Watcher in the Forest

The Watcher in the Forest

After doing all of this, I realized I could have saved myself a lot of this work if I had used my dSLR with a shallow depth of field to take the photograph. 🙂 But the end result, with that dream-like background, would have never have happened with shallow depth of field alone, so it turns out well I went through the processing. Not only that, I learned about when to apply bokeh blur and when not to, as well as learning I need to find a full resolution blur app! BlurFX is looking pretty good to me right now…

How about you? What post-processed Artistic Blur is working for you? Share it with us, by linking in below.