Li Ward photographer of pets and weddings. Fat Orange Cat Studio is a fresh and candid boutique photography service in Boston, Massachusetts.

This is Luna, a sweet little terrier mix who’s still tearing up the dance floor at nine years old. She lives not too far from me here in the South End, so we met one weekday morning for our shoot that lasted maybe 30 minutes tops. Her owner wanted me to grab a few shots before she headed off to work. My heart jumped into my throat as I panicked a little, thinking about how little I’d be able to capture in 30 minutes…but then I remembered my session with Fergie the Shar Pei back in Sept and how I managed to pull off a nice collection in a short period of time.  So I need to stop freaking out about short shoots. And the best part is the post-processing time is cut in like, one million. It took me longer to write this paragraph.

Anyway, isn’t Luna cute?! I miss having a dog…

My favorite thing about Luna – aside from her swishy tail, or her love for Teddy Bear, or her DIY haircut (we used to give our dogs haircuts all the time, and it’s funny that Luna looks just like my childhood cockapoo) – was the St. Francis pendant dangling from her collar. In case you’re not familiar, St. Francis is the patron saint of animals. And the environment. Basically an all-around good dude.

Thank you Luna for a fun and wonderful shoot!

P.S. No behind-the-scenes shots on this one. I forgot!

Ever since I was 15 I was determined to end up in New England. It didn’t necessarily stem from the need to be someplace different from where I grew up (the South), but from the want to be someplace really old. By American standards anyway. And you can’t get much older than Boston. My fascination with the area and colonial cemeteries began in high school while learning about the Salem witch trials. Any place with a history that claimed the right to religious beliefs and practices while stone-crushing an elderly witch-man to death was a place worth getting to know!

Colonial burying grounds are still my favorite places. The hand-carved slate gravestones, the skull, cherub or willow tree etchings (different depending on the time period), the typeface of the engravings are all beautiful. And the stories they tell. I love cemeteries the way I love photography. You get this one sliver of a moment in time, and if it’s affecting enough, it’s not difficult for your imagination to decide what happened before and after that moment. So when you come across a shared gravestone documenting a succession of same-named babies that don’t survive past 5 minutes, let alone 5 weeks, the story that it tells of the parents, their feelings before, their feelings after, their living conditions, even the weather, is rich and almost limitless.

And the typos are interesting too! I wondered what 1 7 2 1/2 meant, in that last photo. Is that the engraver’s way of correcting his date error? Or something else entirely?

Thanks to Shang Chen of Shang Chen Photography for meeting up with me here at the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge and letting me use her 24-70mm lens. Finally to meet a fellow NIKONIAN, laaaaaa! All the photos above are taken with that lens, except for the 2nd to last shot which was taken with my 50mm. If I play my cards right I will be getting it for myself sooner than later. I did a lot more post-processing on the photos than I normally would too. It’s landscape photography – which I’m finding I’m really bad at, so sad – so why not.

Floy-Floy-Floyd!

That’s how we called to Floyd during his second photo romp last weekend in the snow. You may remember our first session last summer in the Boston Public Garden and Beacon Hill when he was 13 weeks old. He’s a little bigger now but just as impish and floppy-eared as ever. We met again at the Public Garden, now covered in snow. There were a ton of other dogs out – snow makes dogs PRANCE!! – so we all made new friends that day. Later we warmed up at the Taj Boston hotel (formerly the Ritz-Carlton and which I still call the Ritz, as if I had some personal tie to it when I do not; I’d never set foot in it until now) where Floyd replenished himself with water from the ladies’ room faucet. Later he revealed his naughty side by making a run for the tea room’s kitchen. I don’t know how he knew exactly where to go where he was least allowed – he pretty much dashed down a flight of stairs, turned left, bore right and went straight into the kitchen without a moment’s pause. However dog-friendly the hotel was, they weren’t too crazy about a Floyd in the food prep area! We left right soon after. And headed to The Four Seasons hotel :)

Thanks Floyd for another fun and wonderful shoot!

Here are some behind the scenes shots at the Four Seasons and Taj Boston.

I’m finishing up posting some shoots from 2009. These adorable fuzzballs of fun are Ben and Ginger, cockapoos extraordinaire at your service. Our shoot took place back in November at their home in Savin Hill, MA. Ben is the cream-colored, Ginger is the rotund chocolate. Her coat is so very luxurious upon that round body, that like a giant hairy marble she rolled rather than ran towards her intended destination. It is no surprise that Ben was always the first to arrive at the squeaky toy or the stick, with Ginger huffing and puffing from behind!

When I saw this new edition of Pride & Prejudice, my favorite book of ALL TIME, I knew I had to have it. I hadn’t realized there were two other classics illustrated in the same manner by artist Ruben Toledo for Penguin Classics, so I bought them too. It’s part of Penguin’s “deluxe editions with graphic covers” collection, and I must say it’s a brilliant marketing move! I already have half a dozen editions of Pride & Prejudice, bought for their varying typefaces and literary commentary, and several of editions of Wuthering Heights. So I totally bought these books for their covers.

Edward Gorey if he were still alive would have been an excellent choice to illustrate these classics too. Can you imagine his cover for Jane Eyre? Goosebumps! I hope JE is next on their list.

I’ve never read The Scarlet Letter. In high school I was in the English class that got saddled with David Copperfield, which ruined me from all things Charles Dickens for a very, very long time. But we did read Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and the only thing I got out of that book was what a “gable” was. And that New England sounded intriguingly bleak (I grew up Atlanta). Perhaps now with this spiffily illustrated cover – and a full appreciation for New England’s bleak winters – I will be able to enjoy Hawthorne’s writing more, heh.

(As an interesting side note, Toledo’s wife is fashion designer Isabel Toledo, who designed Michelle Obama’s lemongrass shift dress and overcoat for the inauguration. I wonder what their house looks like.)

So for 2010 I plan to do “Things I Like” posts on a regular basis with things that I…uh like. And things that inspire me. This is number 1!