Kat Eye Studio

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Learning Black and White in Lightroom

Another Lightroom progress update today, I continue to be incredibly happy with this software! I’m still editing my photos from our Thanksgiving weekend southern Oregon trip and learning more about Lightroom along the way. Yesterday I did my first black and white conversions, with the help of Scott Kelby’s Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers. I loved the texture of this old building in Jacksonville, and thought it would be cool in black and white. What do you think? Do the little Christmas lights get lost? I kind of like them as a surprise you find when you look closer.

Yesterday I also discovered the power of the search function in the Lightroom Library module. Can I just say – WOW. I now have my 85,000+ images in my Lightroom catalog (I know, it’s insane, tell me about it). While I don’t have them keyworded, I can search on filenames in Lightroom which makes finding a photo from my Inspiration File in the catalog a complete and total snap. Prior to this, the only search function was me looking around, since Windows search didn’t work very well on my computer. I organize my photos by date and have a good chronological memory so me sorting through the directories has, amazingly, worked up to now, but the more photos I take the harder it has become to find them. And when I did finally find them, then I had to load them into the software for editing. A future project is to keyword at least location for all of my files, but now being able to look by filename and move directly into editing is already two steps easier.

I still have so much to learn about Lightroom, but I can tell you thus far – this software is made for photographers. Especially photographers like me who take a LOT of images and need to be able to organize, sort and edit them. I’m figuring out how to adjust my workflow to take advantage of all of the Lightroom features, but overall it is very intuitive. While it’s sold as being for professional photographers who need to manage client shoots, I believe any photographer can get a lot out of this software.

Do I sound like an ad? Sorry. I’m just really excited about Lightroom! The more I use it, the better it gets for me. I’m off to edit more photos…

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Finishing those Opposing Lines

Curves in OppositionWe finish up Exploring with a Camera: Opposing Lines today. This topic was a bit more challenging, wasn’t it? It had me looking closely at my images with lines, to see whether there was that feeling of tension, of lines moving in opposition through the image or not. I found it’s much more common for me to use leading or converging lines in my photographs than opposing lines.

It was fantastic to see all of the different interpretations explored for this theme. I have to admit, the one that made me laugh the most was a photo of two football teams (american football, that is) lined up and ready to play. What a creative interpretation of “Opposing Lines” in that image! Here’s another great observation of opposing lines, from the Flickr pool:

reflection -opposing lines

Have fun visiting your fellow participants, and see what they saw as opposing lines. See you back here tomorrow with a new Exploring with a Camera topic! (And by the way, I’m feeling pretty much normal today, thanks for all of the get well wishes the last couple of days.)



FYI - Links will be moderated. Please use a permalink, ensure that your linked image is on topic, and include a link back to this site in your post through the Exploring with a Camera button (available here) or a text link. Thanks!

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Two Things at Once

ReflectionDo you ever feel like you are trying to be two things at once? I certainly do. I am an engineer. A photographer. A mother. A wife. A friend. A teacher. A blogger. A corporate worker. A small business owner. Shall I list them all? No wonder I needed to focus on balance this last month.

The focus on balance led me to this book: One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success by Marci Alboher. As I finished it over the weekend I had to sit for a while and think about what I took away from the book. It had many strategies for managing a “slash” life like mine. Filled with stories of people who have dual careers such as computer programmer/theater director and lawyer/minister, it gave real life examples of people who have made multiple careers work. Marci covered the difficulties and pitfalls, but the rewards too. It allows a new answer to the age-old question, “What do you do?” It validated that I am not alone on this crazy path.

In fact, it’s led to me to reflect that for my entire adult life I’ve been some form of this more-than-one-thing-at-a-time path. After graduating with my bachelors in electrical engineering, I worked full time as I pursued my master’s degree in the evenings. After gaining that degree and a new job, I relocated to Oregon and started a hobby of scrapbooking. (I pursued scrapbooking with a passion equal to a job, completing book after book.) The scrapbooking led me to become a Stampin’ Up! demonstrator soon after my son was born. If that’s not crazy I don’t know what is: Working at my engineering job, new mom, oh, and let’s do this side business too! To be fair, I didn’t really pursue Stampin’ Up! as a business, but when I started to teach stamping and scrapbooking, I realized how much I loved teaching. I was hooked. It got to the point I loved the teaching more than the stamping, I only stopped that to move to Italy. Is it any wonder that I found something else to fill the void? Travel, photography, blogging – all led to this new passion and desire to teach in a new realm.

The funny part: It’s starting to all make sense. I used to feel like someday I would have to choose between “being” the engineer or the photographer, but now, I don’t feel that way so much. I will probably always default to pursuing multiple things at once. I think that is who I am. It’s just how my energy flows. So it’s no longer about choosing one answer to the “what do you do” question for me, it’s about balancing the different parts to a cohesive, satisfying and not-too-overwhelming whole. It’s about letting myself embrace the idea of the “slash,” that it’s ok to be more than one thing at a time. That I am more than one thing, and I always will be. We all are.

In my “About” page you’ll see the fruits of all of this contemplation – I identified myself as a Photographer/Teacher/Engineer/Mother. I could add about five more slashes on there, but those get to the heart of who I am right now.

How would you answer the question, “What do you do?”

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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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Window to the Morning

Window to the Morning

Window to the Morning

What can a window tell you about a person? This one tells me of someone who loves color. Someone who uses their only east-facing window to catch the morning light, nurturing as many plants as possible. It doesn’t matter that the view out the window has a cable running through it. It doesn’t matter that the building has a few flaws. Using what is there to the best effect, that is what matters.

I captured this image on my photo walk in Philomath on Friday. It caught my eye as this spot of bright color on an otherwise empty east-facing wall. I thought about cloning out the cable, but decided that’s part of the charm of this window. The color and life amidst the imperfection.

We all have views like this. Both the real and the figurative windows of our life look out on imperfections. This image reminds me, it’s what we do on the inside that matters, not the view we see. Do we use the light we have? Do we add color and life where we can? Do we create a view we want to see, while accepting the one we don’t?

Yep, windows can tell you a lot about a person. What would yours tell me about you?

Linked in to the Creative Exchange today.

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Fascinations, Part 2

As I mentioned yesterday, one of my latest fascinations is mail boxes! (“Letter boxes” for those of you in the UK.) These are disappearing around the US too, just like parking meters. Replaced by safer and more efficient shared post boxes, these are a bit of life that is going away. I remember the excitement as a child, of putting up that flag when the box had mail and seeing it down later in the day after the postman had come. I would run to see what had arrived in the mail. It’s sad, I don’t even have one in front of my house now. We walk up the street with a key to see what arrived, and it’s usually junk. Bills don’t even come anymore, they are sent via email.

Mail boxes are a symbol of so much else disappearing too, personal mail and the written letter. We all love to get mail but how often do we send it? Not so often. That’s why the Liberate Your Art postcard swap was so much fun for many of us. For a little while, we got fun mail!

In honor of little-used mail boxes everywhere, let’s all send a postcard or a letter or a note to someone we care about today. I’ve got my pen out now! Won’t you join me?

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