Kat Eye Studio

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And this time, with Color

As I go through teaching Find Your Eye, I am following my students in their assessments of their eye and rediscovering mine all over again. It’s been a wonderful experience. I’ve been able to define my style even further, to state that my best images have an element of line, color or texture. Yesterday’s images were about line, devoid of color. Today I’ll show you more of the dance center Kirstin took me to – the inside is all about line and color together! 
Such wonderful, bright colors, green and pinks together. Lockers of green, walls of pink. Hallways of green. Everything bright, cheery and open. Can I come study here?
I even played around with bokeh lines. How’s that for some influence from my muses? 
Even wavy lines to catch my eye! There is a companion photo to this one, of me, floating around on Kirstin’s memory card. 
Thanks again Kirstin! I hope you all enjoy this little bit of summer color today. I’m off to photograph some more fog this morning in the park. 

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Peek-a-Boo

Traveling in January means you might have bad weather, and it was a bit grey on our trip. On one of the days threatening rain in Lisbon we visited the Oceanário de Lisboa (Lisbon Aquarium). It was a very nice aquarium, said to be the largest in Europe and the first to have exhibits of all the world oceans. It is always so interesting to get to see these unusual creatures up close and personal. I especially love the tiny frogs of various colors, like these hidden in the plant. I almost missed them in the exhibit until I looked closer.

We like to visit aquariums as we travel. Brandon has never been a “zoo” kid but he’s always liked aquariums. We were spoiled in Oregon, with the Oregon Coast Aquarium being less than an hour away. When Brandon was little, we had a membership and would just pop over for an hour or two to wander the exhibits. We would watch whatever he was interested in at the moment, even if it was just the wave pool.

There is something peaceful about watching these animals of the sea. It takes you away from the lights and noises and hustle and bustle of our world, to a calm blue-green place. I could photograph them for hours, trying to get the perfect shot. Unfortunately, Brandon doesn’t have that kind of patience. 🙂 Traveling with a child, you learn to shoot fast and keep moving, relishing the moments you have.

Visit me at Mortal Muses for another aquarium shot today, of the cutest sea otters ever!

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The World is a Canvas

Wandering the back alleys of Burano, I found this. Sometimes I wonder, do the people who leave these things out, for me to see, know what they are doing? Do they see what I see in them? The fusion of textures, the contrasts, the repetition of color? Sometimes I think they do, and I am lucky enough to see it with them. Sometimes I think no, this may just be a chair someone set here, to sit outside their house on a summer evening. I wonder.

This morning I picked up Eric Booth’s book, The Everday Work of Art, for the first time in a long while. Here is something I read on this topic:

The moment we see that the world we inhabit is not just a sequence of hard, dead surfaces with fixed absolutes, but that it also can be seen “as if” it contains many non-logical truths, many mysteries, we head into a better future. The “as if” transforms artifacts into live media for the work of art.

I don’t quite know if that makes sense outside of the context of the book, but I see it in this photo. This chair, in this location can be a place to sit, or it can be seen as a work of art. How do you see the world?

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Exploring with a Camera: Dappled Sunlight

This image fills me with a sense of peace. The greens and blues, the sheltering trees, the path to follow, with the archway leading you right around the corner into the sunlight. It’s a safe, shaded place to pause before moving onward. Beautiful.

This path is part of Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia, where we spent one day hiking along a series of lakes with wonderful waterfalls. Just as spectacular is the path you follow, that winds you along and right up close and personal with the waterfalls or “splat” as they are called in Croat. It was an enjoyable day, a nice break from the cities we had visited to commune with nature and see something new.

I’ve often struggled with getting a good exposure in dappled sunlight images like this one because of the high contrast between full sun and full shade, a common problem in the middle of the day in the summer. Here are a couple of tips for your own explorations of dappled sunlight:
1. In the camera, underexpose. You want to make sure that the bright areas of sunlight on the leaves and the path are not overexposed or “blown out” completely. If that happens, you lose the ability to make any adjustments to those areas later in photo editing software.
2. In your photo editing software, consider two edits (I use Photoshop Elements):
– Adjust Levels to get back the “bright” areas if they were underexposed too much.
– Lighten shadows or Darken highlights to get less contrast between the light and the dark areas. I’ve found the biggest problem with dappled sunlight pictures is that the dark areas are too dark relative to the brighter area of the photo, so if you just lighten them up a bit it looks more like what your eye sees.

For this image, I underexposed a full stop in the camera and then just adjusted levels to brighten the highlights back up, because the exposure was pretty good overall. A small bit of cropping and I was done!

I also played with Pioneer Woman’s Lovely and Ethereal Action for Elements, and I like the depth of color and the dreamy quality this one gives as well. I can’t decide which one I like better!

Try your own dappled sunlight pics, and let me know how it goes! I’ve created a flickr group if you want to share your exploration results called Kat Eye View: Exploring with a Camera. Come join in!

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Just Because

An image I love, just because of the green and brown. Just because of the depth of field and the light. Just because of the contrast of budding, growing life against the peeling paint and grungy pot. And maybe just because there is peeling paint involved. Enjoy this image from Braubach, Germany. It could be from anywhere, even in your own little corner of the world. Can you go out and find your own “just because” image today?

PS – I’ll be disappearing from the blog for a little over a week as we travel to new places. I’m already anticipating much creative excitement, poring over photos upon my return, and sharing them with you here. Ci vediamo! (Which roughly translates as, we’ll see each other later.)

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Market Still Life

This bright still life is from a market we ran into in Paris during our visit there in September. I loved the sun on this lemon, and the bright colors surrounding it. Why it was sitting there, all alone in its tray, who knows…

Tomorrow we leave for Paris, to go to Disneyland Paris for a few days. After a week at home being wonderfully lazy, I’m excited to go see someplace new, yet a bit familiar. I’m sure I’ll have lots of fun images to share after the trip, but in the next few days I’ll be posting some of my favorite shots from our first trip to Paris in September.