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I gave in to the temptation of seeking advice on social media about social media last week. I'm still recovering. You'll be pleased to know that all the devices in the house remain intact, nothing was thrown, or dropped or had anything dropped on it. At least I managed to resist those temptations!
And after taking all the sage advice on board (as well as the less-than-sage but expressed convincingly), I decided not to engage in the ever-increasing hysteria about pleasing THE ALGORITHM. The mighty and capricious Al Gorithm (personified in my head like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain!) Not sure if sacrifice of first-born is required quite yet, but I probably couldn't catch mine now and , anyway, his kids would miss him! It’s not that I don’t understand how it all works - or that I can't learn about it! (Staunch believer in lifelong learning here). It’s that while the influencers and social media gurus are also banging on and on about "authenticity", chasing trends feels like about the most inauthentic thing I could be doing, drifting further and further from real connection, to each other and to our awesome natural surroundings. So if it's audience v authentic connection - I'll come down on the side of connection.
Be a leaf on a tree. As my very good friend Mahatma Gandhi told me over dinner last week: "The only time not to be a leaf on a tree is if you're on a tree that's about to be cut down." - Gyles Brandreth, The Seven Secrets of Happiness, An Optimist's Journey
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Last blog post we chatted about the benefits of hanging nature photography in your home. (Yes, alright, it was a one-sided chat!). Sometimes, though, we do need to actually step outside. Or at least stick head and shoulders out a window! Research shows that even gentle, everyday encounters matter. Yes, for the science-y types, there is actual research. If you'd like to dive deeper I'll add links at the end.
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut.
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But wait, there's more (naturally)! It's not just about enhancing interior design, it's for reducing stress, creating a positive emotional atmosphere, connecting with the natural world, and inspiring creativity and reflection.
What's next? So, hanging nature photography is more than decoration—it’s a lifestyle choice, promoting wellbeing, inspiring creativity, and connecting you to the natural world outside. Whether you love dramatic landscapes, serene seascapes, or fascinating miracles of small details, the right photographic prints can transform your space into a sanctuary of calm and inspiration. Of course, here at LightSplashes, we're happy to help. Browse our shop, and reach out if you'd like to discuss different sizes or surfaces. And because sometimes we do reluctantly have to leave our havens sometimes, next month, October 2025, we'll be offering something new and a little bit different in our mission to foster creative inspiration and connection/reconnection to our natural world. Stay tuned ! Sign up for our inner circle emails for early updates, previews and offers (Link in side bar)  About this time last year I posted about "The Picasso Solution" where I mentioned that I am privileged to teach art to small-ish and middle-sized people, while at the same time developing incredibly tolerance for mess not of my own making as well as employing my own creativity in developing strategies for encouraging the small people to clean it up. I also get to enjoy the zingers of wisdom young artists present beautifully and matter-of-factly. Simple statements of the obvious, that grown-ups have forgotten they knew.
(Which brings us to my current soapbox topic - perfectionism. Don't engage in it. Just don't. It stifles creativity, stresses you out, makes you feel ill, encourages you to engage in unhelpful and unrealistic comparisons, and prevents you from fully enjoying your preferred creative pursuits and your wild and wonderful life . It so often stems from fear and stops you getting started. (I'm sorry, Perfectionist Readers, I know you're out there, clutching your (metaphorical) perfect pearls. I know this is scary for you. Not suggesting lowering standards to the extent of living in chaos, getting fired, or ignoring responibilities. Just gently suggesting that you spend your energy wisely. Prioritise. I know "spoonies" who get it, without having much choice in the matter, but it's not just a mantra for those diagnosed with chronic unwellness or ongoing impacts on ability.
Be as kind to yourself as you would to others. Just the way you art is actually perfect.
How do you exercise your creative brain? Are you a "recovering perfectionist"? Want to have a chat about it in the comments? I'm right hand dominant. But a couple of years ago I joined The 100 Day project and gave myself the challenge of 100 Days of non-dominant hand drawing. AND actually made it to the end of the challenge, with a little over 100 sketches, drawings, paintings, scribbles on whiteboards (hey, sometimes we have to make the most of the time and materials at hand). It's a practice which, like blind contour drawing (see earlier post) I return to when I need a boost creativity and productivity boost.
Non-dominant hand drawing is a brain workout. like blind contour drawing. As we've already established in earlier posts, workouts are good for that muscle between our ears. It helps kick the less-exercised side of our brain into gear and spark up those neural pathways, improving coordination and enhancing creativity. Our dominant hands hold muscle memory, which is very convenient for getting daily stuff done, but our non-dominant hands are the quiet introverts with loads of untapped potential waiting to be noticed. Want to start thinking outside the box more often? Show your non-dominant hand some love. If it doesn't take you out of the box, it will at least re-shape it, and a change is as good as a holiday, right?
How to Get Started:
When you feel ready for a further challenge, try blind contour drawing with your non-dominant hand! Comment here, or on LightSplashes socials , and let me know how it goes.  Blind Contour with Non-Dominant Hand. Himself hiding under hat and behind lens (his social media profile pic). "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when he grows up" -Picasso. "Every child is an artist". Printed and laminated in colourful letters in school art rooms around the globe. Some of those art rooms will also be decorated with lovely anchor charts and rubrics - you can go check 'em out on Pinterest - carefully instructing the children (who are already artists, according to Picasso) how to do it right. One of my (not!) favourites is the rubric insisting that kindergarten children should use "colours that make sense"! (Suns are yellow apparently and trees are green and brown, not purple with pink spots and blue stripes).
That's the solution to the Picasso Problem. Permission to PLAY! It works for responsible adults too. Want to step up your own creativity, activate the happy, healthy endorphins, give the muscle between your ears a valuable work-out, give your worn-out grown up mind some necessary R&R - give yourself permission to play. Diarise it or Google Calendar it, if you must be all grown-up and schedule-y. But just do it. For the fun of it. Because it's good for you. Play is actually something to take seriously! There's stacks of research. This one's a good place to start “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut. So what's next? Ready to play? Check out my previous "Snap Happy" post for some ideas or just grab some crayons and get started. Yes, crayons. They're not just for kids. Permission to play, remember? Just have fun with it. More about crayons next time. Meanwhile, in the tradition of Eric Carle (and Franz Marc) on a scrap of Kraft paper, here's Skippy in Blue!  "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." -Dorothea Lange. "Learning to draw is learning to see" - Betty Edwards. Photo - graphy. Light drawing. From the Greek. There you go. (In the spirit of Gus Portakalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding).
Dorothea Lange 's words quoted at the beginning of this post open so many blogs, articles and reflections that it's running a perilous risk of cliche, to use them again. A photo-journalist, passionate about social justice Lange used her camera to "teach people to see" what was happening in their world, to inspire change. So although I hovered over the delete button, I'm letting her words stand, since this blog is about to "learning to see" and accessing innate creativity , and who knows what might change through that potential!
But your main HOMEWORK for this week, (yes, I did say "homework", don't make me use my teacher voice!) is: 1) Get out and take photographs. Look for new perspectives. Crop and edit and play with them if you wish. Just have fun with it! 2) Look at what other people are snapping. Find some photography to follow on social media. Don't think about (or Google) what gear the pros are using, just look at the images and consider the compositions that appeal to you. Photo challenge accounts on Instagram are a fantastic resource. You might like to jump in and join the current challenges or just follow and observe. (We'll talk more about challenges in future posts...stay tuned!). Make sure you look at their hashtags too, so that you can see a range of participants, not just the featured few. Highly recommend the @fms.photoaday account - a longstanding challenge initiated by Chantelle Ellem who blogs as Fat Mum Slim (Find participants with the hashtag #FMSPAD). Also follow @it's_my_week, new theme and new hashtags every week.
Have questions? Feel like a chat? Jump into the comments here (but please be aware that comments are moderated, so if your comment doesn't appear immediately, I might be sleeping, or painting, or out taking photos. I will get it it ASAP. Also find me @LightSplashes on Instagram or Facebook and we can have a wee chat there and put some social back into social media. Feel free to share your photography adventures by tagging @LightSplashes.  Light and Shadow Study. This one's available for you to bring some green into your work or living space. Click the image. "Learning to draw means learning to see" - Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. "Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see — to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilizes as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time." - Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw I knew about blind contour drawing before my vision loss. Didn't practice it much because, you know, perfectionism. It took a pretty drastic loss of vision to recognise the pointlessness of perfectionism, so once I could see again, I was ready to give it another try, which was fortunate, because my "normal" way of drawing didn't work any more. Something happened to the eye-brain-hand connection when vision was temporarily in abeyance and then monocular for a while. Even when I couldn't read the top single letter on the eye chart, there was enough handwriting muscle memory left for me to sign my name and write shopping lists, but, during the period of lost vision and recovery, somehow the connections that allowed me to draw and paint (and compose a reasonable shot through the lens) became scrambled. I could see all the leaves in detail as we drove along tree-lined streets, I could count every blade of grass and read ALL the number plates and signs (out loud!) but so far as actually making pictures went, I had to learn to see all over again. I started out with crayons and coffee cups. More on that another time. I went back to Betty Edwards' classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and some advice about getting back to basics from Danny Gregory and decided to give blind contour drawing another shot, too.
It's also calming. It can be a mindful, meditative practice. We're all about mindfulness these days. When it's hard to slow down and meditation is challenging, the blind contour focus on observation and slow drawing offers us a way into a calmer state. So long as we can let go of perfectionism. Blind contour drawing helps with that too. Knowing in advance that the result is likely to be weird and wonky, we can get comfortable with making mistakes, learn that an eraser is not necessarily our friend and enjoy plenty of "happy accidents".  September '23. A new take on the obligatory 'spring blossom' shot for Insta.
Often, blind contour (and non-dominant hand) drawings can have a certain spirit, personality and vibrance that isn't always present in careful attempts at rendering realism. Even when they resemble a car crash!
Want to know more? You could go down the Google rabbit hole, but I recommend author Austin Kleon's thoughts on blind contour drawing as a good starting point and for people who work with little people, grab some ideas from Sarah Krajewski .
Would love to see your blind contour practice. Feeling brave enough to share? Tag @lightsplashes on Instagram or Facebook. Just have fun with it "What photography is, is life lit up" - Sam Abell.  "Brothers" at Newport Beach, Sydney, NSW, Australia
How do we do it? (We're often asked!) No problem. Gear packed the night before, travel mugs on the bench ready with tea bags, layer upon layer of clothes ready to climb into. (It's still a bit brisk in the mornings). Swimming gear in case we're inspired to take a (bracing!) dip. Actually, it's much like getting the family to squad training, minus post-training breakfast of Weetbix, bananas and the litre of milk. Oh and with the added excitement of missing a crucial turn-off and turning the last part of the drive into a race to the chosen location to beat the sunrise. Sometimes words might be said. Fortunately watching sunrises improves moods and reduce stress, so generally all is forgiven when Sol is properly up and it's coffee and egg-and-bacon roll time. (This may be what's impacting the weight loss - or lack thereof!).
He’s chased many sunrises, not just as a photographer, but as a swimming parent, and swimming coach (occasionally even a swimmer himself), not to mention all the 0.Dark.Hundred shifts on school camps. And road trips. Did I mention many, many sunrises on road trips? Every one a new challenge. Speaking of challenges, check out the black and white image in the slideshow below. It was a bit of a cloudy sunrise at Bilgola yesterday. Sometimes even the sunrise looks better in black and white! It's a little late, (hey, I got up early yesterday!) but my thought for this Fathers Day was that 'father' is not just a noun, but a verb. A doing word, as the school kidlets say. Let's continue to celebrate and appreciate all those doing it. Sydney ocean pools preview "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." - Henry David Thoreau, (although I've read some arguments that he didn't write exactly those words). What do I see? When I'm out and about in the landscape I see art. I see colour and texture, shapes and lines, expansive views and tiny details, connections and compositions. The art in nature invites me, invites us, to slow down. To be still. To re-establish connection. I was reminded how much what I see matters when, for a while, I couldn't see much of any of it. Long story short: persistent doctors were able to 'crack the code' to treat my recurrent and mysterious eye condition and vision is restored! There aren't enough synonyms in the thesaurus for 'grateful'! So now, when I work (and play) with acrylic paints, watercolours, oil pastels, and my cameras, every photograph, sketch and painting is a celebration. As an artist and photographer with an educator background, of course, it's all about the learning. Learning to see. It never stops. (I'll natter on about that in future posts.) Yesterday, I listened to artist, illustrator and author, Dub Leffler give a Book Week talk, explaining to fascinated primary students that each piece of art he creates is a learning experience, from tiny quick sketches in a journal to final paintings for book illustration, and each one is practice for the next one. (Go check him out, by the way. Read your kids some of the books he's worked on!)
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AuthorLight Splashes is a family affair, but it's me (Kathy) who'll do most of the banging on in the blog. (Important Photograhy Tip 1: Selfies always look better in black & white). 
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