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

I love packaging. I could spend hours packaging up a single client’s order and I never do it the same way twice. It’s not exactly good for efficiency, but it sure is fun. Lucky for me, Paper Source is just a short walk away, and Rugg Road Paper Co is not much further.

The paper and accessories may vary client to client, but with each I do always include a business card, sometimes of that client’s own pets if the timing works out, and a handwritten note. I also keep to the same Fat Orange Cat Studio color scheme of orange and blue (or shades of). Everything else is up for grabs!

Japanese paper and ribbons from Paper Source, little birdie paper clip from Anthopologie.
Calligraphy on note cards and business cards by Paperfinger, letterpress by Parrott Design Studio.

I had fun with this next order for Freddy and Sydney.  I couldn’t personalize their larger print products, preferring to leave them safe and bubble wrapped as they came from the printers, so I went to town with the smaller prints their owners also ordered. The main package is wrapped in tissue paper which I folded before wrapping to create a pocket. I made sort of an “obi” with scraps from my Japanese paper, and glued that below the pocket. A thin strand of ribbon anchors the top. Inside the pocket I tucked in an envelope and a note card. Clipped to the note card is a business card with an image of Freddy and Sydney from that very shoot. Since it was close to the holiday season when the order was completed, I embellished the front of the envelope with some holiday stamps. Flip it over and you’ll see it’s closed with a business sticker. Yay stickers!! Inside this envelope are…more envelopes, one to hold loose 5×7′s, and another to hold loose 4×6′s. I calligraphed their names on one of them.

See it all deconstructed.

Tied up with a big orange bow with the larger products

Phew. By the way, the main package contains a customized photo box of 5×7′s on matboard, one of the products I offer with pet prints. I’ll show these and other products in the next post!

I had the entire long weekend to bask in the glow of seeing Sarah & Rich’s wedding on Style Me Pretty, and guess what, after all the Thanksgiving leftovers (I roasted two ducks and they came out horribly!) and overconsumption of cocktails and eggnog, and even after having the post now pushed down to what, the 5th page or so, I am still riding high! I was especially pleased to see SMP pick several photos featuring the calligraphy I did for her escort and dessert cards.

Anyway, I thought I’d stretch your interest level a wee bit, hee, and ride this train out a little longer. I’m sharing some behind the scene photos from the wedding, along with a peek at another collaboration Sarah and I have going on.

Dan came along with me to Maine. Like with all weddings, I show up early to scope the area out, particularly for portraits. Near the ceremony area was a little grove of trees that I thought would make for a pretty backdrop, but I had Dan stand in for a few shots to see if the scenery translated well on camera. Sometimes what we see with our eyes and what the camera sees with its eye can turn out very differently.

The below photo of Sarah & Rich is the resulting shot, and is one of my favorites. The sun was starting to hit low by then and it cast a pretty glow across the trees. There were plenty of rich shadows and pockets of golden light, which looked amazing against all that greenery. Earlier in the day, Dan stood in roughly the same spot. As you can see the light was quite a bit more even then. (He’s showing me an acorn, ha ha)

Here we are with Sarah and her bridesmaids, before the ceremony. They all got ready in an apartment adjacent to the barn pictured below. During this time the sun was riding high and directly into people’s eyes, so I chose to shoot into the sun to avoid squinty portraits. And anyway, I like shooting in the sun in general. I’m using my favorite lens, the 85mm f/1.4

The resulting shot below:

Walking across the lawn to get some portraits with horses:

Back at the grove of trees, I caught a portrait of Sarah while the sunlight was hitting a pair of young pine trees just so. I asked her to stand there between the two trees and positioned myself so that her veil caught all the light. So much body contortion going on to just capture a simple little portrait…

And now, with the wedding done and finished (sob), Sarah and I were onto our next collaboration – calligraphy and letterpress (yay!). As I’ve mentioned bfore, Sarah owns a letterpress stationery studio, and for her annual collection of limited edition letterpressed calendars, she asked me to write out the months of the year. I was happy to oblige, and so beyond excited to see my writing in print for the first time. Her calendars have been featured on various paper blogs, including Oh So Beautiful Paper and Paper Crave. I have no problem riding on her coat tails ;)

You can purchase a calendar for yourself on her shop here!

Sarah and I have at least one more project in the works which I am eager to show in the New Year. It will involve photography and paper, yum…To think, this all started when I photographed her dog Simone way back in April 2009! I had no thoughts of getting into weddings, or calligraphy, back then. Who knew that all these exciting things were going to transpire from that day?

I woke up this morning to an email full of exclamation points. It was from Sarah, who in September had her farm wedding in Maine. Today, we’re on Style Me Pretty!

Thank you to Sarah for spearheading the submission, and for the great write-up.  This is a lovely way to start the long weekend…

If you know me, then you know I hate fall. Fall is unjust. Fall is cruel. Just as I’m getting a taste of summer sun which I’ve waited the better part of a year to arrive, it gets pulled right out from under me and we begin that miserable descent into New England’s bleak and endless winter. That what fall says to me. No fun in the sun for you!

But as I’m putting together Floyd’s coffee table book – from 3 sessions over the year – I find myself looking forward to the snow. . .cold breaths. . .gray skies. . .winter. . .Because how bleak can it really be when you have more photos like these to look forward to?

Between photographing pets and weddings, and starting my little calligraphy offshoot, I’ve been keeping myself extremely busy this summer. Here are some more calligraphy pieces I had the pleasure of working on lately.

Lisa and David are having their wedding in New York state this fall. Their invitation suite is being crafted in letterpress by Parrott Design Studio in Providence, RI. They didn’t have a particular calligraphy style they wanted to use, so this was a great chance for me to come up with something new. Even so I didn’t have the courage to do anything too crazy or unconventional, though I wanted to! Instead I decided to have flourishes that swoop under instead of over, and to add little curlicues at the ends.

Anna and Jeremy are getting married on a private island off South Caroline this fall. Their invitation suite is being made by Goosefish Press, who just won Best of Boston 2010 for best stationer!

Aside: I really, really, really very badly really want to photograph a wedding in the South. Savannah, Charleston, Georgia Islands, anywhere in Louisiana. Want it so badly my teeth hurt. I almost had my own wedding in Vacherie, Louisiana just outside New Orleans where I spent some of my childhood. I wanted the ceremony under ancient live oaks that are so prevalent in the south, its canopy of arms so gnarly and dripping with Spanish moss. I wanted a camelia and Spanish moss bouquet, a crawfish boil for dinner and beignets for dessert. Ah too bad I was too lazy about planning an involved destination wedding, so hopefully one day I can crash someone else’s, heh.

Anna is having a live oak letterpressed onto the main invite. Their invitation suite is a little more formal with both outer and inner envelopes. Her wedding is going to be amazing. I’m jealous!