Oregon

October 10, 2013 by Kat

My Time of Year

Look, look! You can see the branches. It’s getting to be my time of year.

Apps used: Snapseed, Distressed FX, Mextures, XnView FX

I wondered, would I love to photograph the trees as much this winter as last? As my heart goes pitter-patter over this image, I think I have my answer: Yes. Yes, I will.

Along with this image, I have a couple of random things to share with you today…

I’m over at Mortal Muses discussing the importance of print. It’s been a while since I’ve mused with them, and I hope to inspire more people to get their work into print. Come say hi!

I found out my Christmas Valley Sand Dune image has been accepted into the October MobileMagic exhibition at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria, Oregon. Yay! They have a monthly, juried exhibition of mobile photography and I’m excited to be in this month’s exhibition. You can learn more about applying to this monthly exhibition here.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

October 8, 2013 by Kat

The Apple Man’s Hands

I wandered through the Corvallis Saturday Market on the Kelby Worldwide Photowalk this weekend. It was hustling and bustling, the booths overflowing with fall’s harvest. The upside of all of the rain we get here in Oregon? Things GROW.

Surrounded by all of the abundance, I was drawn to this spare booth. Not even a booth, really, just a table.

A table with a tablecloth, and apples simply lined up and labeled.

Boxes of apples for purchase down below.

And behind the table, a man with a twinkle in his eye and a paring knife in his hand, ready to offer me a taste of apples. I asked if I could take pictures and after he jokingly posed for me, he told me, “You should be over on Steens Mountain.” Which led to a random conversation about mountains, and hunting, and, of course, back to apples. When he offered me a taste a second time, I couldn’t resist.

And as he cut me a slice, I captured this photograph, my favorite of the day. The apple man’s hands, offering me up a slice of his hard work.

I walked away, pondering what photography brought me to: Out wandering the market, on a photowalk with strangers, talking to strangers, photographing strangers. That’s a stretch for the shy, quiet person I think myself to be. But with the camera in my hand, I am brave and confident. I become the person I want to be.

That leads me to a song I’ve been wanting to share with you. It seems that every few years there is a new pop song about letting go and being yourself. Each time I hear the new one, I envision a new crop of young people being encouraged to be who they are. I hope they get it sooner than I did. But at least I found photography, and this blog, as a way to “say what you want to say, let the words come out.” It doesn’t matter how long it took, I finally got it.

Enjoy Sara Barielles, Brave.

October 3, 2013 by Kat

Join me for a Photowalk – Wherever you may be!

The Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk is this weekend, Saturday October 5. Did you know? Are you signed up? There’s a good chance there is a photowalk in your area. So far, there are 1231 photowalks and 26488 walkers signed up. That’s a LOT of photographers!!

This event is a great way to get connected with other photographers in your local area. You could meet some wonderful people, find some great groups to join, and maybe even win a prize. Each local walk will have a winner. Enter your best photo from the walk and you can end up with an e-copy of Scott Kelby’s Lightroom 5 Book for Digital Photographers. Way cool, huh? The winners of each local walk’s contest go on to the big photowalk contest. I won the local contest with this image, two years ago:

But the contest really isn’t the point, it’s just the bonus. The point is to get out with your camera, meet other photographers, and celebrate our love for this wonderful art medium. Will you join us, wherever you may be?

Get more info and register here.

Images in this post were taken on the 2011 Worldwide Photowalk, which walked around downtown Corvallis. We’ll be walking a similar route this year, and I can’t wait to see how my point of view has changed. Come join us!

September 26, 2013 by Kat

Hard Work

Last week, I participated in the United Way Day of Caring with my group at my corporate job. Our task was to clean out and level horse stalls. It was messy, manual labor, quite different from our office jobs on computers and usual group interactions.

Along the way, this photo caught my eye, with it’s repeating lines. I edited it this morning to share with the group, not planning to share it here.

But between this photo and some conversations going on in the Find Your Eye: Journey of Fascination discussion group, I’ve been thinking about the value of hard work. I’m not going to go out on a limb to say something has to be hard to have value, but there is something to be said for working hard and getting through to the other side in a different place. For sticking to something and seeing it through, whether it’s cleaning horse stalls or creating art.

There may be times we wish for something easier: An easier task, an easier creative process, an easier life. But would we value our successes as much? Would we find pride in our progress? Would we celebrate our accomplishments in the same way? I don’t think so.

This photo and these thoughts fortify me as I look at a daunting list of things to accomplish over the next few weeks. It’s time to grab the wheelbarrow and do the hard work. It will be worth it on the other side.

Come visit me at Fall Festival this weekend! My art can be found in the PhotoArts Guild booth (#114), and I will be working in the booth Saturday and Sunday afternoons after 2pm. I will also have pieces in the Philomath Open Studios Tour booth (#130). I would love to meet you!

September 24, 2013 by Kat

Two Years, Two Months, Two Weeks, Two Days

Two years, two months, two weeks, two days. That’s how long we lived in Italy. As of last Monday, that’s how long we’ve been back from Italy. Ever since passing the two year anniversary of returning home this summer, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned since moving back from abroad. How I’ve grown and changed since then. What’s been easier, and what’s been harder. Today I will share a few thoughts with you… Two years, two months, two weeks and two days later.

First, I must talk about the time in Italy a little bit. You see, I went to Italy with a small personal goal: To figure out who I was. The year before my assignment started, there were several rounds of layoffs at my corporate job. That can be scary, but even more scary if it makes you realize how much of your identity you derive from your work. I started to realize that if I were laid off, it would be like the rug being pulled out from under me. Who would I be? How would I define myself? And I knew that was not a good situation to be in. I needed to figure out who I was, beyond external definitions. Who I was beyond being a mom, wife and engineer. I honestly didn’t know.

So I took lots of books with me to Italy and I made time to read and journal. Following my intuition and growing interests, I began to explore art. I started visiting art museums and exhibits, dabbling in painting, and taking my camera with me wherever I went. I wrote about what I was discovering in my journal and on my blog. And, lo and behold, I slowly uncovered an artist underneath all of the layers of self I had put on over time. I discovered within myself someone who could take observations of the world and re-form them into something new and different through words and photographs. And I began to understand who I really was, what mattered to me and what I struggled with, in unexpected ways through these expressions in words and photographs. It was wonderful. I felt powerful, and I knew, just knew, that I had found the key piece of who I was that would continue beyond the unique time and place of living in Italy.

I was right.

Monet’s Water Lilies at l’Orangerie, Paris

And I was wrong.

Because when I moved back here to Oregon, I began to have an identity crisis of a different sort. Who was I as an artist, without living in Italy? Would I still have words to write, photographs to take? I hadn’t realized, until returning home, what I was gathering up during that time in Italy was a different set of external definitions and expectations, wrapped around this new identity as an artist. I had tied myself up in thinking “what” I was photographing or writing about defined me as an artist the same that “what” I did as a career defined me as a person. Damn! Maybe I hadn’t made as much progress as I thought. I had traded one thing for another, and I still had lots of work to do. Personal work, artistic work, to discover who I was, independent of a place.

It was make or break time. Either I would come out the other side, still defining myself as an artist, or I would move on and look for something else. Because as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, Italy and Europe is no longer at my doorstep. I’m not a huge world traveler anymore, hopping to new countries every couple of months. I couldn’t rely on travel to fuel my artistic and personal growth any longer. As much as I love travel, I knew that always wishing to be “somewhere else” wasn’t how I wanted to live my life after moving back to Oregon.

So returning to Oregon really just continued me on the journey I had started in Italy. The last two years haven’t felt as much like trial by fire, with the intensity of change I experienced in Italy, as trial by slow cooker. It’s taken me longer to figure things out, probably because the landscape of life is more familiar, the pace of new experiences is slower.

I’ve come out on the other side of this transition from Italy to Oregon, and yes, I am still an artist. I’m not the same artist I was when I left Italy, and that is a very good thing. I look back at that point in my life and that person I was fondly, but not with longing. “Italy Kat,” as I’ve called that version of myself, didn’t know what I know now. Even though she thought she had it all figured out, she wasn’t as balanced in her life or grounded in reality. She didn’t understand that she would continue to grow and change in ways beyond her wildest predictions, and that growth and change, continual reinvention, is an essential part of being an artist. She didn’t yet understand that you have to learn to be happy with who you are, no matter where you are, what you do, or who you are with. You have to find the grounded, centered confidence of who you are at your core, or external things – the place you live, the job you have, the relationships you are involved in – can define you. And all of those things are transient, they can go away, taking huge chunks of your identity with them. I’ve learned that I don’t want to always be looking to elsewhere for my identity, as an artist or otherwise. That gives up control of who I am, and my happiness, to others or to circumstances.

My Water Lilies, Oregon

To be honest, I know I have a long way to go before I really get to the independence of identity that I’m talking about. I may never really get there. But through this journey to Italy and back I’ve at least learned a bit more about myself, discovering myself as an artist and finding out where “place” fits in for me. I’ve learned I can let places, people and circumstances in my life influence and change me, without letting them define me. I can take them in, use them, and always, always come out with something new that is of my own making.

Because I am, at my core, an artist. And that’s what artists do.

September 17, 2013 by Kat

Chasing Lines and Light

We arrived home from Eastern Oregon on Thursday evening and I’ve had a few days now to process the trip. I’ve been processing in more ways than one: Both editing the photographs and thinking about what I discovered about myself and my photography.

This was the first time I had ever traveled with other photographers for multiple days, with the express purpose of finding photographs. Sure, I’ve gone out for a day with photographer-friends before, and I’ve photographed over multiple days on trips with family and friends. But the purpose of this trip was all photography, all the time. That’s new for me.

So what did I learn?

First, I really enjoy traveling with other photographers, or at least these photographers in the PhotoArts Guild. They are respectful of everyone’s creative process. If anyone saw something that they wanted to photograph, they’d stop the car (as soon as it’s safe, of course). After we’d stopped, everyone went their separate ways, wandering back to the car when done where they patiently waited until the last person was ready to go. I sensed it as an unspoken rule: You didn’t hurry anyone along. You respected the creative process of each individual. After a while I stopped worrying about making anyone wait and just went with the muse… If I was inspired, I continued to photograph. If not, I hung out at the car, editing on my iPhone or chatting with the others. This approach meant that we didn’t always get to the destination that was planned for the day. It meant that we might miss dinner. But that was ok, because we were all doing something we enjoyed and were (hopefully) creating amazing photographs.

I took only my iPhone, intent to continue learning how this little camera was going to work for me in new situations. It was a last minute decision to do it this way. I had my camera bag packed with dSLR + 3 lenses, along with my tripod, all laying by the door waiting to go. Then, the night before leaving I thought, who am I kidding? I haven’t been inspired to edit a dSLR photograph in months. Why not just take the iPhone? Why not just see if I felt limited or not? I’ve always thought the only way to really learn a new tool — camera, lens, whatever — is to use it exclusively for a while, and see where it works and it doesn’t. So I left the dSLR at home and brought only the iPhone and accessories.

I got some good-natured teasing from the rest of the crew, but as always, the iPhone worked wonderfully for me. The only times I felt limited were when I wanted to zoom in on something I just couldn’t get closer to, because it was too far or there was some obstacle in the way or it would change the angle too much. When that happened, I found I kept looking and discovered different things to photograph. Or I framed things differently. Or I discovered new ways to include the feature I might have zoomed in on, maybe with a foreground or some other feature included. It was a good challenge, and I found I wasn’t frustrated by the shots I couldn’t get. I was pleased with the ones I did get.

I also had the chance to really work with the Photojojo lenses I bought a few months ago. I discovered that I don’t like them. Not because I didn’t like having other lenses to use, because I did like that. I just didn’t like these lenses. I didn’t like the sticky ring that you have to put on your camera; it fell off at one point and I had to apply a new one. I didn’t like the way the lenses have all of these pieces and parts you have to undo to put the lens onto the camera. I didn’t like the optical quality of the lenses. They are all fuzzy at the edges, and you have to focus in the center – which is not usually my composition style. I also managed to lose the wide angle lens, which screws onto the macro lens. That actually turned out to be a good thing – because it made it easier to use the macro lens and that’s the one lens I actually liked of the bunch. After playing with these I’ve decided I’m going to try the Olloclip instead. Fewer pieces and parts, no sticky magnetic ring and hopefully better optical quality. I’ll let you know how it goes in the future.

I discovered that while I’m getting better at capturing landscapes and the wide angle view…

…it’s still not my favorite perspective to photograph.

I prefer to get closer, and share a more intimate view of things. I find having parts of things included in my photos more intriguing than the whole. Photographing this boat one morning, one of the other photographers on the trip joked that I could stop taking pictures, he had already photographed the scene. I held up my iPhone and asked him, “But did you take THIS photograph?” He quipped back, “No, I managed to get the whole thing in.” We laughed, and went on. But the comment made me think. You see, I don’t WANT to get the whole thing in. The image I created with part of the boat is more compelling to me than the ones I created with the whole boat. That held true for most of the photographs I liked from the trip. They weren’t the big picture view; they were the small scenes and details.

At first I attributed it to the iPhone, thinking that’s just the type of image it is well-suited for: Getting up close and intimate, since it’s doesn’t have a zoom. Then I realized focusing on the small scenes and details really comes from within me. It is my eye; my view of the world. Small scenes and details are what I have ALWAYS been drawn to, regardless of the camera I carry. So saying that the iPhone is well-suited to this type of photograph means that the iPhone is well-suited to my style of photography. Which must be why I don’t feel limited with this little camera in my pocket. In fact, I’m liberated, because it is always with me.

I wasn’t sure I would find anything to photograph on this trip. I have to be honest, going to Eastern Oregon was not my first choice of places to go to photograph. If you asked me to make a list of places I want to photograph, this area wouldn’t have even appeared on my list. But these guys were going, and they said, “Want to come?” I had the vacation time, the family was busy with work and school, so I thought, Why not? Not only did it appeal to me to just go off and photograph for a few days, I wanted to get to know the other Guild members better and I held a bit of curiosity about the place that draws so many of them back year after year.

And while it wasn’t my usual subject matter, it grew on me. I discovered the sand dunes and the aspens and way of life that is completely different from mine in Corvallis. It showed me that there is so much to Oregon that I haven’t explored yet. So many places to go, so many things to photograph.

In the end, I discovered that no matter where I go, or what camera I have with me, I will always find things to photograph and find ways to make interesting images. I am, at my core, a photographer. It’s just how I see the world: I’m always chasing lines and light.

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