Jim’s early self portrait paintings can be seen down the hall from the main living room.

Our pillows are art too. We bought these in Tahiti and cherish them as a special purchase and memory of our time there.

Merrik from the Center for Fine Art Photography’s Human + Being exhibit and two of my early fine art self portrait pieces
balance each other out in size and complexity.

Memorable snapshots of our sailing trip to Tahiti, the kids when they were young, Merrik’s first surf lesson, Maliea’s ultrasounds
and matching hand position once she was born plus one wedding photo grace our dressers in contemporary black frames.

Something great to come:
I want more structure here with less busy-ness on the dressers but time and
lack of financial commitment to it has kept me from doing anything yet. But,
I do have plenty of leads for wonderful ideas that I have pinned on my
Pinterest boards!

I’ve been thinking about our home interior a lot lately: the way it presents itself to me on a daily basis and the way it is for the kids as they become more aware of their environment. Both Merrik and Maliea are prolific ‘creators.’ Merrik makes things out of paper, fabric, cardboard. He reminds me so much of myself when I was young. I would spend hours “making things.” I want to capture this and display it all but his airplane turned X-wing fighter turned Wall-e costume, and now a groundhog hole and volcano-all made out of cardboard-are hard to keep forever. So, it is a challenge. I am thinking a mobile and display shelves will help with the 3D objects when I get there.

But flat art is different. I love having artwork around the house. I am working on displaying the kids’ paintings and drawings in their own room. Essentially all Jim and I had in our bedroom until the kids were born was our own artwork: my photography and Jim’s paintings and a few framed pictures of us together-sailing, our wedding day etc. Now I am starting to add photos of the kids that have been in exhibitions and other photographs of them as they grow.

I encourage you to go big. I have recently moved around some other art in the house-vintage travel posters, a Fijian navigation map made out of bamboo-to make room for large fine art prints of the kids. I also encourage you to mix painting, illustration and photography in your art displays. I love how they can balance each other so beautifully. Special family portraits and personal pieces of art created by a family member or from a memorable trip can help to express to your guests and remind yourself daily of how full your life is.

Kristianne Koch Photography

Kristianne Koch specializes in artistic portrait photography of families, children and couples. 949-702-7707 kristianne.koch@cox.net

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits one-self, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
― J.W. von Goethe

Whatever you have been saving up for, waiting for, yearning for, begin it now. Don’t put it off any longer. The first step is the hardest and scariest and most rewarding. What have you come here to do, to be, to learn, to share?

Kristianne Koch Photography

Kristianne Koch specializes in artistic portrait photography of families, children and couples. 949-702-7707 kristianne.koch@cox.net

I’ve been working on a personal series for some time without really knowing that I was doing so. The series’ evolution has been a long process which I started about 10 years ago. It is a junction of two distinct aspects of my life: fine art photography and weather.

I have always been fascinated by the weather and more in tune with it than most people. My dad was a navigator in the Navy and he brought his love for tracking the weather to me. We worked on a weather graph for one of my science projects when I was in elementary school. We always had a weather station at home to follow the air temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed. I grew up in a place where weather was somewhat non-existent. Some rain, barely any wind and not much fluctuation in air temps. But as I got older I found myself in new places where I could use my knowledge of the cloud formations to predict the weather.

By the time I was spending every weekend climbing in the Sierra Nevada, I found myself interested in experiencing adverse weather at altitude. My favorite climbing became high altitude climbs: Mt. Shasta, Popocatapetl and Orizaba offered the potential for inclement weather because they were so high. I loved photographing at altitude because the sky looked so blue. I finally moved to Colorado with the main intention to experience weather in the Colorado Rockies.

Then, when I met my husband, and we planned a sailing trip to Tahiti, I had no idea how concentrated my focus would be on the weather. We watched the clouds and ocean 24 hours/day. When it was dark it was about “feeling” the weather. Did the seas feel different? Did the wind feel different over the course of the night? I technically lived outside for 2 years watching every cloud formation, measuring every breath of wind and feeling the humidity change. Sailing puts you as close to nature as you can possibly be.

It’s been nine years since we have been “home” from that adventure and I’ve been instinctively trying to stay in touch with the weather from home. Surfing definitely keeps me in touch with it but even that method is limited now with the kids at arms length. My photography business has stepped into that spare time that I would probably use to go surfing-at least for now. So, I have been using my camera to stay in touch as witness to the ever changing weather and beauty of life at what feels like cloud level (our home sits high up on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean).

My series titled “Ambients” is after Alfred Stieglitz. In doing more research about his “Equivalents” I found a certain comfort in realizing his path as a photographer is similar to mine: long and impassioned. Even though he was a phenomenal photographer, he wanted to produce work that communicated something more than what others were seeing in his current images.

Alfred Stieglitz, a great promoter of Modernism in America and an advocate of photography as art, began pointing his camera skyward in 1922. His images of evanescent clouds were meant to express his own fleeting emotional states and reflect the dynamism of a world in constant flux. Originally Stieglitz titled them “songs of the sky,” but he later came to call them “equivalents of my most profound life experience.” The works focus on abstract qualities of proportion, rhythm, and harmony, presenting pure form as music for the eye.

In 1922 Stieglitz read a commentary about his photography by Waldo Frank that suggested the strength of his imagery was in the power of the individuals he photographed.^[3] Stieglitz was outraged, believing Frank had at best ignored his many photographs of buildings and street scenes, and at worst had accused him of being a simple recorder of what appeared in front of him. He resolved immediately to begin a new series of cloud studies “to show that (the success of) my photographs (was) not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone…” He said “I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life –…My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won’t be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”^[4]

The Equivalents are photographs of shapes that have ceded their identity, in which Stieglitz obliterated all references to reality normally found in a photograph. There is no internal evidence to locate these works either in time or place. They could have been taken anywhere—nothing indicates whether they made in Lake George, New York City, Venice, or the Alps—and, except for the modern look of the gelatin silver prints, they could have been made at any time since the invention of photography. And because there is no horizon line in these photographs, it is not even clear which way is ‘up’ and which way ‘down.’ Our confusion in determining a ‘top’ and a ‘bottom’ to these photographs, and our inability to locate them in either time or place, forces us to read what we know are photographs of clouds as photographs of abstracted forms.

I have been beating myself up over this series. Even though many people love them and they sell out whenever I get around to producing individual pieces, I have had a very difficult time showing my photographs of clouds. I have thought them to be cliché and uncomplicated although beautiful. They do make my heart happy, but when I think of “where I am supposed to be as a photographer” I get down on them. I do think they are important in my evolution and they are significant enough to exist. There is so much more to why I continue to create these images and I am finding out more every day. They haven’t been an effortless project. Most of them have evolved out of a special process I created to make them have that special something. I hope they bring those who have started collecting them many years of joy.

Inversion I

Songs of the Sky in Green

Ambient Chord IV

Songs with Notes

Inversion II

Kristianne Koch Photography

Kristianne Koch specializes in artistic portrait photography of families, children and couples. 949-702-7707 kristianne.koch@cox.net

Over a year ago I was made aware of a woman named Aline Smithson. My dear friend Cindy Schafer had taken a class from her in her exploration of fine art photography which I, in a way, turned her onto. Cindy was just beginning to explore photography when I was heading out on my sailing trip back in 1999. I was working as a Marketing Director for a commercial photography lab at the time and was so focused on making money for our trip that I had set my own work aside. I encouraged her to think deeper about what she was trying to say to her audience and to use presentation to make the message clearer.

Anyway, she went on to explore fine art photography and took a class from Aline. In November of 2009 we all lost Cindy to a tragic float plane crash. It was difficult for me to see or do things that reminded me she was gone so I avoided any connection with Aline. Awhile ago I started to follow Aline’s blog and loved what she was doing and saying. I recently contributed to her 2011 Summer Exhibition and have absolutely fallen in love with the images she has compiled. Today, I went to her blog and discovered this: The Chain. The idea is fantastic and I am excited to somehow find my own chain to be a part of.

It’s amazing what exploring and sharing a love for art can do to you. The connections, the inspiration and the frustration are all part of the process. I am so fortunate to have known Cindy, and now have a new inspiration and hopefully more in Aline.

Kristianne Koch Photography

Kristianne Koch specializes in artistic portrait photography of families, children and couples. 949-702-7707 kristianne.koch@cox.net