Kat Eye Studio

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Under the Weather

What do you do when it rains? You get creative with your photography! We generally had nice weather in our week in San Francisco, but one afternoon we had some serious rain. We visited a couple of indoor places and then found a fun outdoor-ish activity – we rode the cable cars around. We waited for seats in the right location (outside bench, on the downwind side of the car) and then rode around the city. The photography challenge I gave myself was to quickly compose interesting scenes from the streets – I called it “umbrella spotting.”

It turned out to be quite fun! It wasn’t about getting a clear photo – that was nearly impossible in a moving cable car in the rain – but about prediction and timing. Here are my favorites from that rainy day. Which do you like best?

Colorful!!

All Blue

The tourists of Lombard Street

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Meeting of the Minds

One of the best things about travel is meeting up with online friends! I was excited to connect with several friends from the San Francisco area during our Spring Break visit.

On this trip I was able to meet Cindy (La Princepessa Errante), Kim (Mosey Along) and Gina (Here and Now). People always ask me if it’s weird to meet up with people you don’t know like this, and my answer is absolutely not. I do know these women, even if we’ve never met in person. It’s like meeting old friends. You already know you have things in common, it’s just a matter of linking a real, 3D person to the 2D online persona.

Gina is one of my oldest online friends, we connected through Creative Every Day and found we had much in common between our photography and love of Italy. I was so excited to meet her in person! We were the early birds and I recognized her right away. She is the nicest person ever, just as you would think from reading her blog. Here she is, capturing a statue in the courtyard of the Hills Bros. Coffee Building.

Kim and I were muses together at Mortal Muses, and formed a strong connection early on. We both love the combination of photographs and words. It was lovely to meet her in person, and to “mosey along” with her for a while.

We both took photos of this warehouse and it will be fun to see how they are different! Me, of course, with my “straight on” view, while Kim goes for the angle.

And we were lucky to be joined by Cindy, a wealth of information on the art and architecture of San Francisco! I loved hearing her stories. She knows much of the history of the buildings and took us to some fantastic places as we walked around, like the Rincon Center.

I think we talked more than we photographed anything. That’s pretty normal with a meetup like this, in my experience. I joke we should call it a “photo talk” instead of a “photo walk.” Our love of photography brings us together but the connections always go beyond taking photographs.

We ended with a lovely lunch and then headed back to the Ferry Building where we parted ways. The weather was kind and held off with the rain until we were finishing up.

It is lovely to bring online friendships into the “real” world. Meeting Gina, Cindy and Kim was no exception. I am lucky to have so many wonderful online friends, made through blogging and classes. I hope to meet more of you in person some day!

It’s always fun to see the perspectives of different photographers. There is nothing like a meetup like this to show you that each photographer has a unique point of view. You can read about Gina’s experience here and Cindy’s experience here. Kim’s off on Spring Break so we’ll have to catch up with her experience later.

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Buddy and the Bay Bridge

Oh, the beauty of a big city with mild weather – scooter sightings galore! All around San Francisco, I noticed a new brand of scooter I hadn’t seen before. These “Buddy” brand scooters are very cute with classic styling and colors. How fun to find this one parked where I could get a reflection of the Bay Bridge in as well!

There are many more scooter sightings from San Francisco to come. I’ll try to not overwhelm you with them all at once, or you might think I have an obsession with scooters or something…

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Which way is up?

The trees know. The trees always know. It doesn’t matter how steep the slope, trees always know which way is up.

A new one for my Town Trees series, this one captures the hills of San Francisco along with the tree. There are lots of great trees lining the streets in San Francisco, but it’s hard to capture one without cars! I actually tried to eliminate the cars in this image, but realized that the cars add to it. It’s San Francisco through and through: the cars parked on a steep street along with the cable car lines. All I needed was a bay window in the building, but you can’t have everything, can you?

The March Photo-Heart Connection is still open and going strong! There are so many wonderful connections this month. It’s interesting to see the topics evolve as the year progresses. Earlier months had a very introspective feel, and as spring has blossomed there is a lightness and joy that is coming through in the heart connections. We are all connected to the cycle of life around us.

You can link in through tomorrow. I hope you will join us!

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Abundance

Everywhere you look in Chinatown, the space is filled. There is little open space. Signs fill the streets, people fill the sidewalks, goods fill the shop windows and cram the shelves.

In some ways, it seems there is this amazing sense of abundance. There is so much of everything. I tried to capture it with my camera, filling the frame so that there was no beginning or end.

But in the end, the abundance rings hollow. It is not true abundance, the kind that fills your heart with lasting joy. It is only a lot of stuff, adding a momentary blip of gratification and then quickly forgotten.

Perhaps that’s why I like photographing places so much. I can create a memory of my experience in a place, with no “stuff” attached to fill my space. My photographs bring me lasting joy with a never-ending supply of new images to create. That’s true abundance.

My new class, A Sense of Place, starts this Sunday, April 8. Tomorrow is the last day to register. Visit here to learn more about the class and registration. I’d love to have you join me to discover your own Sense of Place.

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Crossing Cultures

Where to start on San Francisco? Without a doubt, my favorite part of the city was Chinatown. Wonderful alleys to wander, with infinite interesting details to frame.

The mixture of the common and the unusual was a delight. I loved the cross of the cultures to be found in Chinatown. Seeing the different languages made me feel as if I were traveling abroad, and I found myself surprised when I would enter a store or a restaurant and someone would speak to me in English. In the two years I lived in Italy, I developed some deep-rooted associations between traveling outside my culture and language: If it’s not my culture, they won’t speak my language. It was interesting to see this assumption tested so obviously in a US environment.

The sights, the sounds, the details, and the textures of Chinatown made it my kind of place. We found ourselves wandering here, for at least a little while, on most days of our trip. I just wanted to drink it all in with my camera.

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