Kat Eye Studio

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Waiting

The night is so quiet and still, you almost have to hold your breath for fear of making a ripple in the water and ruining the scene. The lone gondolier on duty rests silently in his craft. He has nothing to do, other than wait for customers to appear for a midnight gondola ride. His daydreams and night dreams drift off into infinity like the reflections in the water. Just waiting. Someone will come.

Guess what? The creative space I was feeling yesterday was perfect. A friend asked me for some design help, and I happen to have this creative time free. I love how things work out. Now I have a fun new project, something completely different to do for a little while. I can help her out before getting back to my own ideas, and will be refreshed for the change of activity.

I was just waiting, like the gondolier, and the right thing appeared…

Do you find yourself waiting? Do you take the time to pause and breathe, and see what comes along?

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London Bound

We head out today for a weekend trip to London, to visit my wonderful muse friend Kirstin and hopefully meet some of you at our photowalk on Sunday.

It’s so amazing to me, to find I now have friends all over the world because of my blog. I hope that I get to meet some of you on my future travels!  Drop me a note via email if you are in any of these places we’ll be visiting in the next few months, I would love to meet up:
Sicily, Italy
Santorini and Athens, Greece
Prague
Oslo, Norway
If you are anywhere around northern Italy, let me know too. A day trip is always fantastic!

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to capture some fog with your camera if it shows up near you.

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Exploring with a Camera: Fog

Winter brings fog, one of the most wonderful weather patterns for photography. I know I’ve said it before here on the blog, but I love fog!  Because you can only see what is right in front of you, there is a delicious sense of mystery, of things slowly revealed.

Fog forms when there is high humidity along with a temperature that is very close to the dew point, it is essentially a low lying clound. You can read more about the science of fog here. It will form readily near bodies of water, like lakes and rivers, and in cooler temperatures. That’s why you often find fog early in the morning, dissipating as the weather warms up.

I’ve had the good luck to live two places now where fog is common: Oregon and northern Italy. It forms frequently here at my house in Italy, since we are right near the large Parco di Monza through which the Lambro River runs. A large, natural open space is a great source of fog – temperatures are always cooler in the park and the moisture is abundant from the landscape.

How can you use fog as an element in your photography? Here are a few ideas…

Fog provides a great backdrop, to capture a single element. A distracting background can be completely hidden in the fog. I use this feature to capture silhouettes, like the lead-in image of the post and this image below. The detail is highlighted by the blank backdrop. I also converted both of these to black and white, to heighten the contrast. One thing to be careful of with fog is underexposure, because the light white background will dominate your camera’s meter readings. Play around with overexposing your images just a little bit to compensate.

As you move closer to a object, fog slowly reveals. Vary your distance to a subject to create a different effect and feel in your images. The two images below are of the same tree on the same day, but taken at different distances. The first one,  farther away from the camera, creates that sense of mystery I was talking about earlier.

For both of these images, I again converted to black and white to heighten the contrast. Fog desaturates colors and your images can look almost black and white straight out of the camera, but converting to black and white can keep the focus on the shapes and tones rather than what little color remains.
You can use fog to get a sense of depth in your photo. While photographers often manipulate the depth of field through aperture, you can also create depth using the atmosphere. Fog creates depth by successively lightening the objects in the background as you move away from the foreground. You can see this effect in the image of the trees below.
Light fog can give a subtle effect, as in the next example. Along with placement, focus and color, the sense of the largest tree as the focal point is enhanced by the fading trees behind.
Heavy fog can make depth obvious, even at short distances. This image of a tree shows the effect of a heavy fog, the back of the tree already fading significantly compared to the front.
All of these examples so far are from farther away, what happens when you get up close? You can see condensation on the surfaces. Get in close to see what I call “beads of fog” on the smaller objects around you.
I’ve talked about what is revealed as you move through the fog, but also consider what is revealed as the fog is lifting. This image, taken looking up through the fog, shows the blue sky peeking through as the fog is burned away by the sun.

In this image, you can see how interesting it can be to capture the sun through the fog. This was an unusual day, because the fog seemed to be disappearing from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Finally, don’t forget about capturing the world in fog at night. You know I love night! Fog seems to amplify the artificial lights of night, creating a warm glow that is unlike any other night effect. I did no color or exposure correction on these, I liked them as they came out of the camera.

I know many of us are anxiously awaiting summer for the warmth and light of the sun. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have right now, take a moment to celebrate fog, one of the delightful gifts of winter.

Today I am going to try something different! As a welcome to the participants in the Scavenger Hunt from Ashley Sisk’s Ramblings and Photos, I’m going to open the linky today and keep it open for two weeks. (If you are in a blog reader, come over to the blog to see the link tool.) I’ll still post the linky next Thursday for Share Your View as usual, if you want some time to capture the fog or look through your archive.

In addition, I’m going to give away a set of my Black and White postcards by random drawing to one person who links in a fog photo. I haven’t given away a set of these yet on my blog, and since this set includes the foggy tree image it is the perfect time to give these away.

Thanks for sticking with me! Good luck with your fog photos, I look forward to seeing what you capture. You can find the code to copy and paste the Exploring with a Camera button on your blog here.

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A Room with a View

Our hotel in Madrid was in a wonderful location, right on Gran Via and a block from the Callao subway stop. Not only was the location great, but we had a wonderful view. We were right on the corner of the building with a wraparound balcony. How cool is that? I loved being able to capture this bustling street at night, from above. Car lights, holiday lights, store lights. Night is when this town comes alive. The streets are crowded, the stores are open late, and the restaurants are hopping. Restaurants don’t even open until 8:30pm for dinner. And we thought things started late in Italy!

Staying up late is not my normal mode of operation, although I’ve stretched from turning into a pumpkin at 10pm to around midnight since we’ve moved to Italy. My work schedule, and the culture, required a shift. It’s been good for me, seeing more of the world at night. I would have completely missed out on the energy and light at night without this experience. I’m so grateful!

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Lessons from Abroad: Join the Blogosphere

Lessons from Abroad: Join the Blogosphere

[This is the last part of a five part series. See the previous parts here: one, two, three, four.]

Wow! We’re down to the last of my five lessons from abroad, to help you find your passion and purpose. The final lesson I want to share is: Join the Blogosphere.

My blog and participation in the blogosphere has been a key part of my personal journey to discover my passion and purpose, in ways that I could have never imagined when I began it in 2008. I want to talk about the two parts of joining the blogosphere that have really helped me, and show you how they can help you also find your direction.

The first part of joining the blogosphere is writing your own personal blog. This can seem daunting for a number of reasons. You are putting yourself out there in a public way – other people can read and comment on your ideas – that can be scary. You may be worried no one will want to read it. You may be overwhelmed with the idea of having something to say or share on a regular basis. You may be confused by all of the technology options, what you think you need to know technically in order to have a blog.

There are a lot of reasons to be fearful of starting a blog – but one very good reason to do it: There is no better way to get aligned with your true passion. The only way to sustain a blog long term is to write about something that you are passionate about, this is an important truth of blogging. If you are not passionate about what you write, it will not feed your soul. You may maintain it for a while but you will eventually then lose interest, drop out.

It may take a while to find your voice and topic for your blog, you might start and stop several times in writing your blog, even start and stop several different blogs. That is entirely normal, if you read the stories of long term bloggers. Finding your voice takes experimentation. You may try on different topics randomly, and have no single direction. But in the experimentation and the seemingly random blog posts, a theme may begin to emerge. You start line of conversation that you sustain for a long period of time. When this happens, it becomes easy, quite pleasurable even, to write regularly. Guess what – you are tapped into your true self, and your passion is starting to emerge. Go with it, wherever it leads.

I started my blog when I applied for this job that brought me to Italy. I thought it would be a good way to keep family and friends back home updated on what was going on, if I got the job. After moving, I found that I wasn’t able to sustain that kind of “update” blogging – I just wasn’t that interested in writing about our daily lives. After a friend pestered me to update my blog, I decided to start posting something I was interested in – a photo every day from our European travels. I would pick a favorite and then write a few words of description along with it. With that, I struck gold. As I selected the photos and wrote about them, I started to learn more about my art form and my creative process. I started to notice and write about what creativity and photography brought me at a deeper level. I started to recognize my passion, through the writing I was doing on my blog. The passion that I now realize was already there, just waiting to be noticed.

There are as many different ideas of what blogs are or are not about as there are bloggers. You will find a whole range of types of blogs on the internet. Here’s my definition, now that I’m established and looking back, and this might be a place to start if you want to begin a blog as a tool to help you find your passion.

My blog is…
A place to explore topics that interest me
A place to share my art and what it means to me
A place to share my experiences and what the personal insights I gain from them
A public place, where anyone (even my son or my boss) might read it
A place to positively connect with other people on the internet
Written from a place of honesty and heart

My blog is not…
A personal journal of all of my unfiltered emotions
A record of events
A place to vent or talk negatively
Written for show or to meet other’s expectations

If you don’t have a blog yet, there are many free options available to try it out. You can be unlisted or anonymous or use a pseudonym if you’re worried about the “public” aspects of it. The important thing is to write honestly, consistently, and about what interests you. Keep following the trail of what you seem to want to write about – your passion lies at the end of that trail.

The second way the blogosphere helps to find your passion and purpose is through participation. The blogosphere is not a one way conversation, where you put yourself out there in a vacuum. It may start out that way, but to truly expand the experience, it should be a two way conversation. Once you are consistently writing on your blog, beginning to find your voice and style and topic, it’s good to reach out to others who may have similar interests.

There are so many blogs and websites out there, it seems overwhelming at first. When you start to narrow down your focus and interest though, you start to see that there are smaller communities within the giant internet community. You might start with a keyword search, and see what you find on your area of interest. From there, you start reading the blogs you find. These might lead you to other blogs or articles, resources you didn’t ever realize existed. Once you get brave and leave a comment on someone else’s blog, you might find that you get a comment or reply back. You start to build a community, through your interactions. You find new resources, you expand your network.

Why would you want to do that? It might seem silly, to look to expand your network or build a community if you are just trying to find your personal passion. But each interaction you have, makes you think. You further define and refine your thoughts as you read ideas and have a conversation with others in the blogosphere. The others you run into have thoughts or experiences or insights that are valuable to you as you progress on your journey. What someone else writes may completely resonate or make clear an idea you are struggling with, or vice versa.

My experience with participation in the blogosphere has been extremely positive and crucial to my discovery of passion and purpose. There have been multiple times that a comment on something I wrote on my blog came along at exactly the right time to help me understand myself in a different way. I’ve had others tell me the same of comments I’ve left them, or blog posts I’ve written. In my exploration of the virtual world, I’ve found other like-minded individuals and true friendships that cross all of the borders and boundaries that exist in the real world. As I’ve started to participate, I’ve followed trails to new people and sites and resources that have, over time, let me toward my passion and purpose.

Would I have started the blog if I didn’t move to Italy? Probably not. I didn’t “get” blogging before, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the computer because that felt like “work.”That was before I recognized the real connections – both to my true self and to others – that joining the blogosphere can bring.

My Passion and Purpose

With all of these lessons on how to find your passion and purpose, are you still wondering what mine are?

My passion is photography as an art form and an expression of my self. I have a personal mantra that I created some time ago, through writing on my blog:

I am an artist, my medium is photography, and I have a unique vision to show the world.

This statement is continually being refined as I change and grow, but that’s my passion at the core.

My purpose right now is to help others to see that they too have a unique vision to show the world, through whatever their art or passion is. We all have creativity inside of us, but we spend too much of our time comparing and limiting ourselves, or focusing on just living in the established routine.

I’ve started down this journey of fulfilling my purpose by creating my first ever e-course: Find Your Eye: A photo course with heart and soul. It starts January 9 (that’s in two days!) and runs 6 weeks (registration is open now at wishstudio.com). The course is designed to help photographers at any level start to develop, recognize and appreciate their personal style; the unique point of view that only they can share with the world in their photography.

All this clarity came through the personal practice of the Lessons from Abroad I’ve shared with you. Pretty cool, huh?(Photo is from Venice, Italy)

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Time Travel

Someone once told me that human beings are the only animals that time travel. We move forward and backward in time unceasingly in our heads. Dwelling on the past or dreaming of the future, we barely glimpse the present moment.

This time of year is big for time travel. Reviewing our accomplishments of 2010, we are astonished that another year has passed. We look to 2011 as if it is something shiny and new, a package waiting to be unwrapped. Really, 2011 will be another collection of moments, strung together in time, just like 2010 has been. There is nothing special about these days at the end of one year and the beginning of the next, they are only numbers on paper. A way to mark time.

Where have you been time traveling these last few days? What have you seen in your past and your future? I hope for today you spend some time celebrating the present moment. Because that’s all we really have, when you get down to it. Our ability to time travel is just an illusion.

Today’s 9 Muses Musing prompt is CELEBRATE. Tomorrow’s prompt wraps up 9 Muses Musing with RESOLUTION. See you then!

Photographic PS – The “time travel” image above was created by setting my camera to a 1 second exposure, and then zooming from max to min focal length during the exposure. You can see it was handheld because of the wiggly lines, if I had been using a tripod they would be straight. I got this idea from my friend Barbara’s post on lights, but when experimenting I found I really liked the effect with people. Below is a normal shot of the same place, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Which do you like better?

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