Italy

November 19, 2010 by Kat

Perfection

I am musing on the theme Thankful over at Mortal Muses today, but I also wanted to share the same photo here on my blog with a little bit more of the story, and why it inspired me to write that post. This photo is from Torcello, one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon. Our first visit to this island was on this most recent trip, it’s a short vaporetto (boat) ride across from Burano, but I was always so focused on the colors of Burano we never took the time to go. It is the first island that was settled in the lagoon and also one of the least visited. It boasted a nice walk along a canal, a couple of bridges, two churches and several souveneir vendors getting ready to pack it up for the season and offering great prices.

It also had this fabulous building. Dare I say it – the perfect building to photograph. I enjoyed capturing it from several angles but when I reviewed the images in my computer, I was just completely overjoyed with this one. It is perfect, to me. For some reason, it just has the meeting of texture and composition and place that I love. This one sings. It is my eye. I knew when I saw the building and photographed it I would capture something interesting, but did not expect the reaction I had to this one.

I don’t know that anyone else will see it the same way as I do. It doesn’t really matter, because this photo illustrates why I love this art form. The fusion of vision and moment and experience that begins with the seeing, continues through the capturing, strengthens in the review and then is completed by sharing the end result with all of you here. There is magic in this process. I love it all.

+ + + + + + + +

The third of my “Lessons from Abroad” article series is posted on the Rising Sun Coaching blog. Check it out and let me know what you think!

November 14, 2010 by Kat

And the winner is…

Today’s photo is another one from the foggy morning we had on Thursday. I love the look of the end of autumn in Parco di Monza here, the colors still bright but the leaves are sparse on the trees and thick on the ground. Not only have the trees mostly lost their leaves, but the fog has arrived and the air has a decided chill to it… winter has arrived here in northern Italy.

But I have a bit of summer to give away today! The winner of the flower postcards is… EVA of the blog to be determined!

Thanks so much for all of your comments and feedback. I learned there are more ways to read a blog than I had really thought about, and I also learned that some changes are just not noticeable. In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing! I want this place to keep the same look and feel every time people visit, while also being able to update and upgrade as new features come along.

So I’ll give you a little blog tour of what’s new in the last couple of weeks…

1. Find Your Eye E-course tab – I added the tab with a teaser a couple of weeks ago and filled in the course description this week. I am so excited about this course, I’ve been working on developing it for months and am in the final throes of completion (hence, the need for KaNoJoMo). It will start January 9 and will run 6 weeks. I’ll tell you more about it in the coming weeks! Registration will open soon at wishstudio and I’ll let you know when that happens too.

2. I put my last name on my profile. This may seem like a silly minor change, but to me it’s about owning my work and bringing my whole self to this space in the virtual world. My full name was appearing in other places I was writing online, so why not here, in my own space?

3. You can follow these links to easily subscribe or find me in all of these places. Before, I had a badge for Facebook, a badge for Flickr and the Followers block on the sidebar. When I wanted to add Twitter, I needed to free up space and make them all easily visible. Since you already follow me in one way or another, you probably don’t even notice this space. Pretty soon I’ll have blog buttons available for my Find Your Eye e-course and for Exploring with a Camera to share that will use some of this space too… Watch for them!

4. I added a “Search” box for the blog. I only post the Top Labels on the sidebar, and go through and periodically add and remove based on the labels I’ve been using, so this search bar lets you easily find things on the blog that aren’t available as Top Labels. If you want to see photos from say, Paris (which is not one of the top labels), you can type that in and find all of the posts that reference Paris. I don’t know if anyone else will use it, but I’ve been writing this blog long enough, I’ve discovered that I can’t even find things all of the time. 🙂

5. The “Join In” section is not new, but I wanted to highlight that I change things here periodically, depending on what’s going on and what I personally participate in. Coming up VERY soon is the Mortal Muses “We are Thankful” blog hop. More information is available here or if you click on the image in the sidebar. I hope to see you in the hop!

For those of you who wondered, I changed the blog header in mid-September (the subway image is from my last trip to Paris) and added the tabs sometime this summer (I actually can’t remember when anymore). The color of the tab section changed when I changed the header image in September, probably making it more visible now that it’s orange. Thanks so much for participating and leaving your comments! I learned a lot. And if you are sad you didn’t win, there are more postcards that will be given away… since I finally got my order. 🙂

I will not be posting on the blog for the next week, I have a seriously intense week of work this week and will not even be online starting tomorrow. Another reason for KaNoJoMo! (I managed to not join anything this week, even though there were a couple of temptations along the way.) That also means that the next Exploring with a Camera will be delayed for a week or two until I can get things caught back up.

So with that, I wish you a great week, and you’ll hear from me later!

November 13, 2010 by Kat

Colorful Expressions

While it is wonderful to travel to new places, it is also nice to go back to places you love. Places that inspire you in some way, that sing to your soul. I have been so lucky to be able to visit the Venetian lagoon so many times. It is a place like that for me. And every time, I seem to find a different focus for my photography. I am in a different place in my life, my creative development, and I see different things.

This time, in Burano, it was all about color and form. Color for color’s sake, how color and shape and light come together to make a beautiful composition. The primary colors of the interior of this boat, are just one example. I could see beyond the colorful canal vistas of the houses lined up in a row, the lace shops, the bussolai (which are the yummiest cookies ever!), to see some of the most wonderful details of colorful expression to be found.

Think about that… if you are always traveling to new places, you don’t get to uncover the layers of the places you love. A trade-off that must be made, one of the hardest, I think!

By the way, the postcards arrived yesterday! Yay! You still have time to go comment on yesterday’s post and enter to win them. I’ll pick and announce the winner tomorrow, and tell you all about what’s new around my little world here.

November 12, 2010 by Kat

What’s new? (Giveaway time!)

Yesterday was the first really foggy morning in Parco di Monza of the season. I love fog, how it blankets everything and slowly reveals more as you move through it. I like this photo, which gives a hint of what the day is going to become, all sun and blue sky, while still showing the deep fog that exists down below. Maybe it’s an analogy for the direction in our lives, when we are having trouble seeing where we might be going. Instead of looking forward, try looking up.

I’m inviting you to take another look today too. I know many folks use blog readers – I do! – and don’t visit my actual site that often. I’ve made a number of changes lately, and so I’m inviting you to come by and take a look!

To motivate you, I’m going to have a little contest too… Come explore the site a little bit, then leave a comment with what “new” thing you specifically like on my blog, to enter to win. Contest will end on Sunday morning, 7am my time, and I’ll randomly select a winner from all of the comments that include something specific. If you are new to my blog, just comment on what you liked the first time you visited! I would love to hear your thoughts.

What will you win? Hopefully, a set of postcards, either those pictured below or one of my new sets, if they arrive soon! I ordered more postcards in September (I still owe some to a few of you, I haven’t forgotten) and they have been lost in the mail twice. I know, I wouldn’t believe it either if it hadn’t happened to me. So they should be reprinted and mailed this next week and I’ll be able to get them out to you. If they don’t arrive in a timely manner, I’ll find some other interesting Italian thing to give away to you. I have some ideas brewing!

So it’s kind of like a mystery giveaway – either the postcards or something behind door number two!

November 9, 2010 by Kat

Miracles

“There are only two ways to live your life.

One as though nothing is a miracle. The other as though everything is a miracle.”

– Albert Einstein

This quote has popped up in more than one place for me lately, so it gave me pause as I read it again this morning. I like the idea of the second way – that everything is a miracle. Look at the beauty that is around us, all day, every day, when we stop to look. The beauty that can be found in a rotting door, peeling paint, corroding metal. I love it.

I think that artists in particular must live in this way – that everything is miracle. How else would you be able to create, if you could not first see the world around us with a sense of amazement? That each thing is a gift – the bird’s song, the turn of phrase, the peeling paint, the situations we find ourselves in. How can we choose to use that gift? Easier to think about when it’s taking a photo of a door like this in Murano, harder when we find ourselves in a difficult situation with another person.

I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I like the idea of miracles much better than the alternative.

« Previous Page