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 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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Playing with Mood

We’re heading in to our last week of studying Artistic Blur through post-processing for this month’s Exploring with a Camera, and I want to talk about mood. Underlying my pause this week has been a definitely moodiness. There is something more driving this need for a break; something is brewing, I can feel it. And it’s the happiest of feelings either, it’s a pent up, moody feeling. It’s a harbinger-of-change kind of feeling.

Yesterday when I sat down to create, that moodiness really needed to come out. Artistic Blur was my friend. Blending gaussian blur with the original image and textures helped me create the mood in this piece:

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Even as I wanted to create a darker mood, this doesn’t strike me as a scary piece. There is still light and color. Just as I know there is light and color in whatever is brewing under the surface of this pause. I will end up where I need to be.

How is Artistic Blur in post-processing working for you? Have you had a chance to play around yet? Artistic Blur is a fantastic tool for expressing a mood. Let’s see what mood you are in.


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What is Self Care?

I’m still in my unplanned pause, but I wanted to let you know that I’m over on the Seek Your Course blog today with a guest post on self care.

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For me, self care is often about balance, as I wrote in the guest post. You hear me talk about “balance” here often.

Self care is also about listening to the whispers that tell me to when to slow down and when to go all out. Right now, my self care is remaining “paused” even though I don’t fully understand why I feel this way. I’m hanging out with my Mom, obsessively watching Downton Abbey and reading fluff novels. It’s hard to see where this will lead me creatively, but I’m not going to fight it.

What is “self care” for you? Do you know?

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Paused

I am a bit out of sorts at the moment. With the holiday weekend and my Mom visiting I’ve lost track of the days. I forgot to blog yesterday! When does that ever happen?

I resonate with the title I gave this image: Paused.

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Like that little bird on the branch, I am just balancing in the moment, neither moving forward to backward. The moment will pass, and motion will begin again.

But for now, I remain…

Paused.