Set in Stone

A last little bit of love graffiti, this time from Murten, Switzerland. In Switzerland, you don't find much graffiti, so these little declarations of love are a bit harder to find than in Italy. I loved the messages etched into the sandstone, in this little hideaway above the town. I wonder how long it took to create this heart?

I guess no matter the rules or the laws or the culture, the need to publicly commemorate feelings remains and is acted out in different ways. Whether it's ink on a wall, a lock on a railing, initials carved into a tree trunk or hearts etched in sandstone, love finds a way to speak. I hope you enjoyed these images, this Valentine's week.

Yesterday I was musing on street scenes at Mortal Muses, so come by if you would like to see the street personality of Lisbon and Chinatown in San Francisco.

Today I have one last message of love to share! Ashley at Ramblings and Photos has challenged us to write Love Letters to Kitty Paw, her cat. So, I dusted off my digital scrapbooking skills to help our cat Stevie send a letter. Didn't he have a sweet message for Kitty Paw?

Click the image below see all of the fun love letters linked in! You might just be inspired to join in too.

Castle Views

A craggy castle on the tip of a peninsula, guarding against intruders to a land of days gone by. This castle is in Sirmione on Lake Garda, an hour and a half drive from our home here in Northern Italy. Yesterday afternoon we took a little day trip out to this town, exploring a new part of this beautiful country. Besides this wonderful castle, there is a nice pedestrian town with wonderful lake views, natural hot springs, roman ruins and the most frigid wind coming off of the lake. A perfect afternoon for some of the best gelato I've had in a while!

I love these old castles. They are so solid, so real, even today. You can tell that life was not easy in the days these castles were needed. Bare stone rooms, small spaces, dangerous stairways. The majority of the inhabitants worked long hours in difficult conditions, lived in cramped spaces without much reward other than food, shelter and protection from invading forces.

This vision is so different than our idealized version of castles with turrets and princesses with flowing dresses. I find I like the reality of these solid places better than the gilded rooms of kings and queens later in history. There is something honest and true that resonates in the bare stone, coming through the centuries to speak to me in this age. Do you feel it too?

Smile

I love this graffiti from a back alley in Bath. I don't know that I've seen happy graffiti like this before. The words scribbled under it intrigue me too, "You might get hit by a bus tomorrow!" I'm not sure if the author of those words intends for you to smile because your life might be over soon or smile because you never know when life will end, but I prefer to interpret it as the latter myself. A reminder not to waste the life we have on frowns.

Happy smiley Sunday! I can't wait to find out who is going to win the postcards tomorrow, can you? Today is the last day to enter.

Symmetry and Conformity

"Georgian townhomes of Bath stone standing row upon row." I wrote that in yesterday's post on Door Personality, so today I thought I would show you what I meant with an image. There is wonderful symmetry in this place, the Circus in Bath. (Circus really just means "circle" for us American English speakers. No trapeze acts here.) A circle of houses, all built to the same design, using the local Bath stone. I originally tried converting this to black and white but you lose the warm color of the stone, so instead I just did some selective black and white to take out a tiny bit of distracting green from a few plants. I love the repeating patterns and lines along the curve of the street.

But in this place, there is no door personality. In this place, to maintain the original heritage of the site, the doors are all the same white, with very little room for personalization. This was a high end area ("posh" to use the British term) in it's day, and still is now. Isn't it interesting, that when you get to higher end neighborhoods, even in the USA, they are protected by covenants and rules and regulations to keep the look of them the same but also that reduces the opportunity for public expression. Granted, that is nice when you are a home owner and want the value of your property to remain high, but it's also limiting.

So while I really love the lines and geometry of this place as art, it doesn't give me the same heart-warming feel as yesterday's door. I'll add personality and non-conformity to the list of things that inspire me, like texture and peeling paint and imperfection. One more ray of light shed upon my soul through my photos.

PS - I forgot to mention on my Postcard Giveaway that I will be selecting the winner via random drawing. I am enjoying all of the convincing appeals that are coming through with the comments, however! You can still enter to win here until Sunday 5-Sep.

Flowers, Postcards and a GIVEAWAY!!

Bath had the most beautiful flowers. In window boxes, hanging from streetposts, in roundabouts - just everywhere. Bath does flowers so well that they are routinely excluded from the "Britain in Bloom" contest for towns, since they always win. For good reason, everyone wins when a town is so full of beautiful, happy blooms.

I love flower pictures - they just make me happy. So I had some postcards printed with a few of my favorites that I've posted here. I got frustrated a few weeks ago when I wanted to send a postcard with a nice photo to someone, something with just a pretty picture and not a touristy one, and I looked all around Milan and couldn't find anything. Along came a discount from Moo (an awesome printing company!) in my email inbox, so I decided to make my own!I went through my posted photos and realized that, for all of the flower photos I take, I really don't share that many of them here. I will have to rectify that! But here are the posts to show the photos I chose a bit clearer:
Making Ideas Real from Murten, Switzerland
Blissful Color from Barcelona, Spain
Abundance from Split, Croatia
Illumination from Nice, France
Stepping Along Flowers from Varenna, Italy

I am sooo happy with the result, I thought I would give away a set of them here. This set of five beautiful 4x6inch color postcards could be yours - to send, to frame, to stick on the fridge or at your desk - whatever will make you smile! All you have to do is enter the giveaway.

Here's how to enter:
- Leave a comment on this blog post by 9pm PST Sunday 5-Sep. Please be sure to include a way for me to contact you (a link to a blog, an email, a blogger profile, or an identifier if I already have your email) so that I can get your mailing address if you win. If I can't contact you, I'll pick someone else.
- That's it!

I'll pick the winner on Monday morning, Italy time, and will let you know. So enter, and you could be smiling at these lovely blooms in person soon. Spread the smiles, tell your friends too!

One Brick at a Time

Today marks my 365th blog post - one year! I've been watching the little number tick up daily on my blogger dashboard and have been marveling. I've written one year of posts. To be honest, it took me two years to get the 365 posts, but I've decided it's the number itself that counts. And since most of the posts are since I started doing the photo-a-day posts last November, it means more to me. It's since that time that I've found my voice, found my eye, found myself here in this daily blog.

It's funny, for the last couple of years, I've watched all of these people share their "Project 365" photos where they take a photo every day of the year, and I always said "I could never do that." It's wonderful to see bits and pieces of people's lives captured daily, and they have a cool record of the year when they are done. But that never interested me. Much as I love photography, I don't feel inspired to take a picture every day. I didn't have interest in a project where I would start and invariably fizzle out after a month or two. But, when I got the idea to share a picture every day, to look through my pile of photos (metaphorically speaking) and pick out the best, the ones that speak to me in some way, now that I could do.

So here I am, at post 365. How did I get here I ask myself? One day, one image, one word at a time. Just like when building something monumental, a cathedral or a castle, it's built one brick, one stone at a time. That's what it takes.

Of course, in my case I don't have a blueprint. I'm just figuring out as I go along and that seems to work. I don't have hard and fast rules for myself, like "you must post every day" or "you must post in sequential order" or "you must have a specific topic" because that would all make it feel like work. I know myself, I would work really hard to meet the self-dictated rules and then, eventually, lose all interest because I would have lost the spark that got me started. Think about it, have there been times where your self-imposed rules have run you into the ground? Do you have any right now? I'm constantly on the lookout for them anymore. I've learned those little self-imposed rules are the ones that can get in the way of following my heart, creating great things because I'm so busy with the work of following my rules.

Thanks for joining me here, thanks for reading post 365 of the Kat Eye View. A place where rules are thrown out and images and words are based on whatever inspires me that day. A place where you can participate too, answer a question, leave a comment, tell me your view. I love to hear what's going on with you! I've met some amazing people this way, through comments and blog hopping and I love it. One more thing that motivates me to keep going!

Ciao until next time, post 366...

(Image is of Rheinfels Castle, in St. Goar, Germany in the Rhine River Valley.)

Fundamental Shift

I came to a surprising realization this morning, that somewhere, sometime in the last year I have made a fundamental shift. I can see this shift in several ways...

In my photography, I have moved from the idea that I'm just capturing our travels to share with family and friends and remember later, to the idea that I'm creating art.

In this blog, I've found my voice, sharing my unique vision of the world around me and my creative journey.

In my self, I have moved from identifying myself as an engineer (my day job for the last 18 years) to identifying myself as an artist.

I am an artist.
Photography is my medium.
I have a unique vision to show the world.

Wow, that feels great to put out there. This is an exciting realization for me. I hope you continue with me on this journey, because who knows where it will lead.

(Photo is the entrance to the Marksburg Castle, outside of Braubach, Germany in the Rhine River Valley.)

Arched Entryways

This arch is an entryway into the castle ruins of Rheinfels castle in St. Goar, Germany. This is one of the medieval castles of the Rhine River Valley, and you can go inside and explore the ruins a bit. It is very cool to get an idea of what life was like in these castles, it seems like a hard life of defending your territory, cramped and not-so-sanitary living. Not as romantic as we make it out to be today!

I liked this photo because of the scale. You can see Patrick and Brandon inside the arch, and get an idea of just how big it was. They needed to be able to ride through on horseback with flags, etc. so it had to be tall. One more use of the arch, not as decorative as the Rennaisance arches in the Italian courtyards, but interesting just the same.