Kat Eye Studio

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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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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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Town Trees: Ashland

Against the Wall

Almost a month ago I discovered a new series to capture, images of trees that line the streets of our cities and towns, bringing a little bit of the forest to our concrete-and-asphalt world. I’ve decided to call this series “Town Trees.”

I found several Town Trees when we visited Ashland, in southern Oregon. This first one is my favorite. I love the shape of this tree, it looks like it has it’s hair all mussed up, maybe it hasn’t had a trim in a while. I love how it’s grown up right against the wall, standing straight with good posture. There were several of these in a row, sentinels guarding the parking lot along the side of a building.

Green and Gold

The colors here caught my eye, how the green and gold in the tree repeated in the windows and their reflections.

Capped

I wonder who thought to plant a tree under an awning? Maybe it was never supposed to grow this tall, but someone should have realized that this is Oregon and trees seem to grow bigger here. Maybe it was supposed to be cultured by a gardener to stay small, but someone cut the landscaping budget. Whatever happened, the tree is thriving and continues to reach for the sky. I love that.

These Town Trees all seem to have personality of their own, don’t they? I think this is going to be a fun series to capture.

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The City’s Forest

Architectural Salvage, Philomath, Oregon

Architectural Salvage

Perhaps it’s just because I enjoy framing street scenes, or perhaps it’s because the latest Find Your Eye lesson is on starting a series, but I stumbled on a new series topic in my photography last week: The city’s forest.

I first noticed an interest in capturing these trees planted along the street when we visited Hood River, Oregon a couple of months ago. I was attracted to the light and shadow. The shape of the tree contrasted with the shapes of the architecture. The interaction of these bits of nature brought into our hard, urban world. It’s as if we know we need the trees at some deeper visceral level, so we mark out spaces in regular intervals along our streets to make room for them. They shelter our path from the sun in the summer and the rain in the fall. They provide color and beauty. They are silent witnesses to the lives bustling under and around them. They survive and thrive, even where we neglect them.

Sheltering the Abandoned

Sheltering the Abandoned

Can you imagine our neighborhoods and towns without these trees? I can’t. Or maybe I can, but I don’t want to. I am always sad when a tree lining a street dies or has to be cut down. The trees we plant are physical extensions of the heart of a place, and something changes when a tree is lost.

I’m on the hunt now, to capture the city’s forest. To celebrate the life of these trees in manmade places.

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