Kat Eye Studio

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Photo-Heart Connection: February

The light on the trees caught my eye. That beautiful winter-almost-spring sun, warming the world around us. That sunlight encouraged us to go out and enjoy the world. Everyone nodding and smiling at the others on the path we walked. It’s amazing what a little sun will do for your mood.

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There is much that draws me to this image. The fine detail of the branches against the softly colorful sky. The lines of the trees, pulling me in and through the scene. The contrast of light and dark. The colors of green and blue and gold — my colors of late.

But I keep coming back to the light.

A light of strength. See how it shines on those branches? It highlights the thin yet supple, strong beauty of the tall trees.

A light of hope. Even if the sky is a bit dark in places, it is not gloomy. Far from it! While the sun is shining, there is hope.

A light of future. It is still winter, but spring is coming, and with it, the light. And while I will miss some of what this winter has brought me, the warm sun that will come more often brings something else beautiful and new.

It’s not long now. You can see it in the light.

I think I say this every month, but this month it was really hard to select my Photo-Heart Connection. By the numbers, I created much less in February than I did in January. By the quality though, I had several images I truly love with strong connections to my heart.

It was hard, too, because as I got it down to the last few images to decide between, the house went crazy. My son was getting ready for school and upset that there didn’t seem to be any food he liked. My husband was sitting there talking to me about one thing or another, tossing the ball to the dog who was scrabbling around on our hard wood floors to catch it. How can you hear your heart in all of that noise and distraction? You can’t. At least I couldn’t.

So I took a break from the process and came back to it again later, when the house was quiet. When I had the space to myself and peace to hear myself think, everything came together and I could finally feel the heart-connection in this image above all others. Just like many things in life, we often need time and space to clearly hear the messages of our heart. It we want to live a more heart-led life, then we need to intentionally create that peaceful space more often.

How about you? What time and space do you need to complete your Photo-Heart Connection practice? How does that translate into listening to your heart in other ways in your life? I’d love to hear, so share in the comments so we can all learn from each other.

You can link your Photo-Heart Connection for February in below, through February 7th.


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Revealing Inner Beauty

Winter allows us to see a tree’s inner beauty

I wrote that phrase as I posted this image to Instagram today. It just fit. What I love about this image is the shape of the tree. Not just the beautiful outer curve, as you would see when it is full of leaves, but the inner beauty of the limbs as they twist their way outward into smaller and smaller branches. You can see the beauty of the whole tree, not only what’s on the surface.

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And it got me to thinking… Life is like this too. Often it’s the quiet patches, the harder parts of life that really show what we are made of. It’s the difficulties and the down times that can reveal our true strength and inner beauty. It’s how we discover who we are at the core.

Just as we would not appreciate light without darkness, we wouldn’t appreciate summer as much without the comparison to the winter cold. And winter reveals an inner beauty, all its own.

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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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A Time for Place

This was the photograph of the day for me on Saturday. A few friends and I traveled to a nearby town, McMinnville, for a photowalk together. We were lucky and the weather cleared for us long enough to wander around the historic downtown for a little while.

We were heading back to the car when the contrast of purple and green caught my eye. I had to cross the street to investigate, discovering this awesome building with a series of vine-y trees (or tree-y vines) growing on the windows. I couldn’t wait to play with this one, editing and sharing the image on the drive home.

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“This reminds me of Italy,” a couple of people commented on Facebook.

Really? I was a bit taken aback. This looks nothing like Italy to me. The materials, textures and colors are all wrong.

Then I wondered, maybe if this is a photo that really looks like a “Kat” photo, like many I had taken in Italy, and that’s what people were seeing. My “sense of place” coming through. Or, an alternate view, that photographing so much those two years I lived in Italy shaped my sense of place so strongly that I end up framing small Oregon towns the same way. (Or maybe it does look like Italy, and I just don’t see it.)

Either way, I have a sense of place. It comes through in my photographs. It grows and changes, but it’s there. It’s honed and shaped by the places I live in, work in, visit and photograph. You have a sense of place, too.

Do you want to find your sense of place? Join me for the 8-week eCourse, A Sense of Place, starting April 7. Registration is open now.

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A Changing View

The sun is shining, I had great creative photography excursion yesterday and last week’s pause is at an end. I have a great view today, but it’s a changing view. I’ve come through the other side of my little break but not without making some important discoveries.

You see, there was more to the pause than my Mom visiting for a week. Underlying the feeling was a growing sense of dissatisfaction with some elements of my creative life. It was as if I was seeing through a dirty window but could sense something more on the other side. After journaling about it the last few days and making some mental shifts and decisions, I want to share them here.

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For a little while now, I’ve felt as if I’m not using my creative time on what I want to be using it for. Here I’ve arranged my whole schedule, working part time at my corporate job and all, to give myself more creative time. And yet I’ve filled it with my “to do” list. Always more to do, isn’t there?

So I’ve taken a look at what I want to be doing with my time and what I have been doing with my time to see what is causing the tension. Based on that, I will be making some changes to create the space I feel I need to continue to grow.

What I want to be doing…

I want to continue to develop my art. I want to spend more time in developing my own aesthetic through study, creation of new work and exploration of print. How I do that is ever-changing and up in the air at the moment, but it requires time.

I want to be hiking in the forest regularly, for my mental and physical health. There is something about being among the trees that brings me peace and makes me feel alive. I want to do more of it, several mornings a week at least.

I want to continue to connect with other artists, both in person and online. The connection and inspiration I find through running my eCourses, my blog, Photo-Heart Connection, the Liberate Your Art postcard swap and interacting with local photography friends are all important and valuable to me, and I can see the value to others as well. I need time to develop these meaningful relationships.

What I have been doing…

I have been spending a lot of time with writing things that aren’t necessarily aligned with my personal goals listed above. Things like trying to blog daily, send a newsletter twice a month, and the Exploring with a Camera blog series. All are things that have been an important part of my creative journey in the past, but they don’t seem to fit the same way they once did.

My intention in the future is to blog when I have something meaningful to say, rather than as a daily routine or weekly/monthly schedule. I think the quality of what I share will improve, even if the frequency lessens. The one schedule thing that you can be sure of: Photo-Heart Connection will continue on the first of each month. Beyond that, I could be here 5 days a week or 1 day a week; we’ll just see what happens.

Exploring with a Camera is going on hiatus for a while. While I love this series and have never written one exploration I didn’t fully enjoy, as I look to the future I’m not sure I still have the inspiration to continue. At least, as I look at my personal schedule for the next few months, I feel overwhelmed when I think of this series rather than enthused. Beyond a few months, I’ll see how I feel. In addition to my own personal reservations for coming months, participation has been steadily declining over time, so I wonder if there is still interest out there. What I spend my time sharing needs to be valuable to both me and others, or there is no point in spending all of the time it takes to write if it’s not useful.

My newsletter will go to once a month for a while, too. I love being able to connect with more people through this method of communication, but it takes a lot more of my time than I’ve wanted to acknowledge. I also have to admit I’ve been overwhelmed by all that comes to my email inbox of late and I think about that for all of my subscribers too. I want any email I send you to be important and useful, not just because it’s on a twice-a-month schedule. Going down to once a month saves me the time of creating the newsletter and the burden on all of your email inboxes, while still keeping in touch in this great way.

I will also be changing my class schedule to give myself some more time off over the summer. Summer is gorgeous, but too short, in Oregon. I need to spend more time outside and less on the computer. It doesn’t affect any eCourses in progress or A Sense of Place (planned for April-May – registration opens VERY soon), but it will affect the schedule for the rest of 2013 beyond May. As I sort it out and finalize dates I will keep you informed through my blog, website and newsletter.

I feel good about these decisions and know they will allow me the time and the space for new things to grow. I’m seeing a little more clearly now, thanks to the pause and the needed introspection. I found out what was on the other side of that murky window I was looking through last week. It’s looking pretty interesting, too!

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Admitting some of these feelings to myself and deciding to make these changes has been an internal struggle. Many of these decisions run counter-intuitive to the common wisdom of running an online business, much of which advises regular interaction on a high frequency through as many channels as possible. The changes also mean mixing up things that have clearly worked for me in the past, and that’s always uncomfortable.

My heart is telling me to throw that common wisdom out the window and that it’s time for a new way of doing things. If I’m not spending the time I need to grow myself creatively — in the direction my heart tells me — then I’m not going to add anything useful to the conversation. And more than anything, I want to add something useful to the conversation of art, creativity and photography. For myself and for all of you.

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Another take on Apologies

Over the last few days I’ve had a sneaking suspicion. I’ve felt like there is more to this whole apologizing thing, at least for me, than meets the eye. That it is about more than fear of sharing or criticism. I’ve been journaling and am starting to sort out this “other” reason. These ideas I’m sharing with you today are fresh and not completely thought through, so bear with me. I’m hopeful sharing them here will bring commentary and insight from you all, which always helps me distill them to something clearer.

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How many of us carry along these little sayings in our head: Don’t brag. Don’t toot your own horn. Don’t hog the spotlight. Be humble. Keep quiet about your accomplishments, the right people will know.

I do. Somewhere, somehow, these sayings have been etched deeply into my psyche. Add to that my introverted and shy nature, which naturally leads me to want to avoid any attention, and you have a recipe for one quiet person. But then you contrast that with my desire to create, my desire to share, my desire (dare I say it) to lead… and you get quite a bit of inner turmoil.

You get someone who wants to do something really well, with all her heart, and have other people see it and join in. Without her having to say anything.

Yeah, right.

I’ve learned that doesn’t happen. To grow anything, relationships online, a following for your art, a business, you have to get the word out there. You have to share your message with confidence and heart. You have be able to say, “Here I am, and I have something GOOD to share with you.” You have to willing to talk and talk and talk about the good stuff you are doing, so the message is heard. It’s called marketing.

All the while, the inner voice is quietly reprimanding, “Don’t brag. Don’t toot your own horn. Don’t hog the spotlight. Be humble. Keep quiet about your accomplishments, the right people will know.” But they don’t always know, do they? Sometimes you have to tell them.

Hence, the apologies. The apologies sometimes come along to quiet that inner voice, I’m thinking. When I’m talking about what I create and do and have to offer others, if I apologize, I can keep that voice at bay. Sort of. I still feel it, deep down. I know this, because when I get any sort of feedback that validates this voice, even if it’s as simple as one person marking my newsletter as spam, it’s deeply felt. The voice comes back with a vengeance, “See? I told you so! Stop talking about this stuff!”

*Sigh*

I’m sorting this out. It’s a bit new and raw right now, this realization of why I might be apologizing. But like all of the things I’ve sorted through in the past that led to some sort of personal growth, it has to start this way. It starts with an inkling; some sort of clue to follow. We’ll see where it leads next.