Kat Eye Studio

by

Spaces & Places

I’ve got places and spaces on the brain this morning! This morning I started the “Creating with the Environment” chapter in Trust the Process by Shaun McNiff. He talks about our physical spaces and response to places in the creative process. I love this line:

We create together with our physical environments and don’t always appreciate how their qualities contribute to our expression.

True for any type of artist, but even more so for photographers. For many of us, the physical environment is the raw material of our creation. We capture and compose from the environment. Like today’s photo… While the owner of the house created this beautiful space on the porch to sit and relax, I captured it to share the idea of cheery relaxation with all of you. Someone else created the place, but I create with it too. So very fun.

Since I love to explore and photograph places, my environment has become my creative fuel. We really explored the concepts behind creating with places in A Sense of Place, the 8-week course that just wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. It was awesome! I love how much I learn by organizing my thoughts into a class and sharing them with a group. I am in awe of how much I gain from the discussion and interaction with the course participants. This week I read the feedback from the class participants, as they shared their impressions of the class. I get a little giddy sometimes, realizing that these ideas of mine have made an impression on someone else too. You can read a few of the comments, newly added to my class information page here. Pretty darn cool that I can do something I love so much and have it resonate with others too! How lucky am I?

I can’t wait to run A Sense of Place again, in spring of 2013. Until then, I’ll continue exploring the spaces and places around me. They are the fuel of my creative expression. What fuels you?

by

Movement of Creative Inspiration

Life is a movement in and out of creative inspiration. The vision must be lost in order to be regained and refashioned. Loss and longing are preconditions of creation.
— Shaun McNiff in Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

A timely quote to read this morning, given my recent brush with low inspiration. When we are in the low parts of the cycle, we forget that inspiration will come back. We don’t appreciate what the down cycles bring us… a renewed and refreshed vision when inspiration comes back.

Where are you in the inspiration cycle these days?

by

The One

Occasionally, I come across something that speaks to my creative soul. It reaches right in and touches the depths of who I am as an artist and what I create. I often call my favorite type of work “Real Life Still Life,” where I seek to compose beauty in a photograph from something that already exists. Some scene created by another person intentionally or unintentionally. Something decorated by time and weather.

Here is one such scene found in my exploration of Northwest Portland on Saturday. It speaks to my heart and soul. The soft light, the subtle colors, the varied textures and Oh! The lines! All of those flowing lines. Heaven.

It fills me with joy just looking at it. It’s this kind of image that keeps me going. Keeps me wandering, and searching, and photographing. Every once in a while I get to capture a scene like this. It’s not often, but I’ve come to recognize the signals. There will be a feeling in my heart, as if inspiration is filling me up and if I don’t act on it, my chest is going to burst. There will be a sense of lost time. Nothing else exists for me as I study the scene with my camera. As I leave the scene, I hope there will be something good in my collection of images. If not, I had that wonderful moment of inspiration.

It’s even more rewarding when I get “The One” from a scene like this. You know The One? The One photograph that makes your heart skip a beat. The One where you say, “Yes, that is perfect! That’s exactly what I wanted to capture.” The One that goes directly into your Inspiration File. The One in a thousand photographs. Maybe more.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen The One. Maybe it’s because I’ve been photographing less. Maybe it’s because I’m getting pickier. Whatever the reason, today’s image the The One from Saturday. From May. From 2012… that remains to be seen.

Have you seen The One lately, in your photographs? How do you know when you’ve found it? Feel free to share your images with a link in the comments. I think this will be a fun discussion.

by

Renewed

This morning I am feeling happy. Creative. Renewed. I am breathing deeper and feeling relaxed.

Yesterday I met up with a friend I haven’t seen in a long time and visited the Portland Art Museum to see the Mark Rothko exhibit one more time before it ends. After visiting the art museum we wandered a little bit around downtown. I was very sad for the lack of photo inspiration I was finding. I was beginning to get worried. What was wrong with me? Was I in a creative slump?

You see, the last couple of months have been sort of a photo-taking dry spell for me. I had a lot of other activities going on and my creative energy was focused elsewhere. Now that the other projects are finishing up I was expecting the photo creativity to come back. It started to, with my rainboot photo shoot last week. But wandering downtown Portland was doing nothing for me. Something was wrong!

I told my friend I needed something different, so we headed to Northwest Portland. It’s got neat shops, old houses and lots of greenery, and I’ve had success with finding inspiration and even scooter sightings there before. Wow, that did the trick! I came away with some photographs I absolutely love, for the first time in a long while. Today’s image is one of these new favorites and I’ll share more this week.

Not only do I feel happy, creative and renewed, I also feel relieved. All I needed was a couple of hours in a place with texture, color and interesting “real life still life” to capture. Whew. No creative slump after all.

by

Wrapping up on Visual Weight

We wrap up our exploration of Visual Weight today! With this Exploring with a Camera theme, have you been noticing how visual weight is a fundamental contributor to great composition? Find the weight, and you find the focal point of the image!

This image from Korkula uses several concepts we discussed in Exploring with a Camera: Visual Weight to bring the focus to the pot of flowers: Illumination, bright color, and off-center placement.

What have you found in your images? You still have time to link in and share with us today! Or, just explore the links below for some great examples of Visual Weight from participants.


by

Spring Cleaning!

Have you ever looked around and said, “Hmmmm, how did this place get so dirty?” Yeah. That’s my studio. I have all sorts of piles in all sorts of places. They’ve been accumulating for months in some cases and it’s time to dig through and organize them. Shake the dust out of the rugs and clean up the surfaces and generally make things spic and span.

There’s nothing like a clean space to sit and relax in, after all that work is done, don’t you think? I look forward to that feeling later today or tomorrow when this cleaning project is done. This image of a courtyard in Dubrovnik, Croatia gives me a preview of that feeling. I can imagine myself sitting under the umbrella by those potted plants with the scent of sun-drying sheets in the air. Nice.

Upcoming Events