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

Bunny, in the tub, where he’s drawn a bubble bath for two…

VanBuren, in the boudoir, where a neck massage awaits…

Happy Valentine’s Day!

OH and Happy Chinese New Year too!

I’ll be the first to admit it: I am horrible at displaying prints. I take and take and take photographs and then I take some more…and at the end of the day I don’t know what to do with so many photos. Album or scrapbook? Desk or wall frames? Which ones, in what order and on which wall? I can’t make up my mind so as a result, many of my photos either pile up in a shoebox or in a hard drive, so sad and all alone. If only I had a little direction to help me organize and display my photos so that they receive the respect they deserve! Because what is the point of taking all these photos when you’re not going to showcase them properly?

Enter The Back Bay Framery, Boston’s premier fine-art framer.

I love supporting local vendors and working with great people, so it is with great excitement and glee that I announce a Fat Orange Cat Studio promotion with The Back Bay Framery, to help you turn your important photos into beautifully framed works of art, ready to be showcased in your home!

When you book a session with me and order prints, bring those print in to The Back Bay Framery and receive 15% off all display products and services! This runs the gamut from desktop picture frames to handcrafted scrapbooks to leather albums – and even custom framing.

There are a lot of beautiful products to choose from, and Kerrie, the owner of The Back Bay Framery, is on hand to help. She has been serving Boston’s custom framing needs since 1998, and because of her wonderful service, hands-on approach, and solidly crafted products, her business has flourished, winning the venerable Best of Boston award several times. I am finally getting a few important pieces custom framed, and Kerrie has been wonderful to work with.

If you visit her store now, you’ll see a rather lavish display of my pet photos at the front of the store…

So giddy to see my photos so beautifully framed! No, these are not your IKEA or Crate + Barrel frames, for sure.

Kerrie runs The Back Bay Framery with the help of her lovely assistants, Sadie Lou and Spike (the Yorkie mix). All three may greet you at the door.

So! If (1) You’re in the Boston area, (2) have a dog or a cat / or want yourselves photographed, (3) contact me to schedule a shoot, (4) order prints, (5) head over to The Back Bay Framery, (6) consult with Kerrie to get them beautifully displayed and (7) receive 15% off your order. Now you have no reason not to have your photographs properly showcased.

The Back Bay Framery
227 Newbury Street in Boston
Between Fairfield and Exeter Street

And tell Kerrie that Fat Orange Cat Studio sent you!

The cats are getting up there in age. I think at 13-ish years, they are officially old, if not elderly. So it’s no surprise that most of the time, the cats are like this:

Occassionally though, something lights the little kitten wick hidden underneath their fair bellies, and when that happens, they’re like this!

Their cat fights can get vicious! There’s muffled cries, tufts of fur flying everywhere, and angry, puffy tails. Well, one angry, puffy tail. Bunny’s nubby tail is such that it cannot puff. It cannot puff.

They fight every now and then and it’s always so funny. I love the way their paws separate into little furry hands and the shape their mouths make when they get the air knocked out of them. Their urge to wrestle though happen unexpectedly or in too-short spurts, and almost always when the camera is in the other room. When I do happen to have my camera within reach, just the act of turning it on takes too long, or if I manage to get that far, me creeping in close distracts them from fighting that they stop as soon as I’m ready to shoot.

I think I have to go all NatGeo on them and wait inside a box in order to catch them in action.

But one pretty good indicator that a rumble is coming is if there’s a cat in the litterbox. The sound of one cat finishing up his business and scratching the box alerts the other to get into position for an ambush at the bathroom door. A mad fight ensues. I happened to be ready this day to document the initial ambush of Veebs. He was doing his thing and scratching madly at the side of the box (stupid cat) and I watched Bunny lower himself into stalk mode. Game ON! Camera’s set, finger’s on the shutter.

But it was still so hard to photograph them! They would swipe, do nothing, swipe, do nothing, run, sit, sit, sit, lunge. During their periods of inactivity I would bring the camera down from my face, and that was precisely when they would suddenly lunge at each other. Crazy unpredictable buggers.

Here they are hopping around with dilated pupils. I really wanted an all out thrown-down but this will do.

^ Note that Veebs has all paws off the ground in the third shot, ha ha!

Puffy tail!!

The quality of these photos isn’t so great. High shutter speed in a dark, litter-filled hallway (I was about to vacuum it up when they started fighting), and a lot of cropping because I stood back to shoot. But you get the idea. They crack me up. I have so, so many photos of them sleeping/lounging/sitting. So the goal for this year is to catch more of them in action, before they become too infirmed to move.

After generally being behind the camera all of the time, and seeing more and more photos of couples being captured by fabulous photographers, I thought, I’d like to be photographed like that please! It would make up for the totally blah photos our own wedding photographer took almost 8 years ago. So blah, and so much regret that we hired him. So a couple of months ago I asked Lisa to officially photograph me and Dan, and used my birthday as the reason. Aside from the birthday, and the wedding photo make-up, there were business-ish reasons too for the shoot. I wanted to see how I was in front of the camera. I wanted to see if I was able to do what I’d like my own subjects to do, and that is to relax, be natural, be comfortable and pretend I’m not here!

Well here are a few things I learned. It might require a few shots of whiskey before and during the shoot to relax. That is ok.  It takes some explicit direction to look natural. Ironically. It takes complete trust in your photographer to be comfortable. Complete. But be careful, if you’re so comfortable that you’re able to pretend your photographer is not there, you will inevitably be caught making a face that you don’t want to be caught making. Heh.

So here are some more photos from last month’s bday shoot. This is a corollary too to my Things I Like post on cemeteries. I love colonial cemeteries so much that I based my first outfit around it. We started in the heart of Boston at Granary Burial Ground, final resting place of Paul Revere and other revolutionaries. I found this sweater jacket with a Minuteman-looking capelet. I wanted one more accessory to seal the deal, but a horse was harder to come by.

The best part about being friends with a photographer is that they’re willing to give you their RAW files! Actually I might have demanded it, heh heh.
So these photos are all taken by Lisa Rigby, and post-processed by me!

By the way, I just want to mention that in the above photos, while I am trying to channel an Asian Paul Revere in Anthropologie look, Dan is actually representing the home country by wearing all-Taiwanese garb – from his necklace to shirt to jacket all the way to his shoes. And you can count the scarf too, which was knit by his little Taiwanese wife. :)

{ Now insert a quick stop here at Beantown Pub for an outfit change and a shot of whiskey }

Boston Public Garden

It was interesting to see too the photos I were drawn to as a client rather than a photographer. I know that when I go through photos I take for others – and photos taken by other photographers! – I can’t help but gravitate to non-subject elements first, such as how the sun hits, how the trees frame, how the bokeh of lights blur in the background. I’m looking at the parts rather than the whole sum. As a customer though, I’m obviously looking more at…myself! The Other Stuff that I get hung up on as a photographer aren’t quite as important. Or maybe they are, but more as subconscious enhancements rather than the focal point. It’s more important if we’re smiling or looking happy. This is what I must remember!

Below are some outtakes. We ended the shoot with drinks at Bouchee on Newbury St, and our server really screwed it up. He poured Dan’s sidecar into my martini glass that already had olives in it, poured my vodka martini in Lisa’s espresso martini glass that already had chocolate-covered espresso beans in it, so I was fishing out olives from Dan’s drink and espresso beans from mine. And making a lot of faces.

I will end by saying how much fun it was to be photographed. It’s a nice side effect of being comfortable in front of the camera, which itself is a nice side effect of knowing that you’re in the hands of a photographer you really like. :) Oh and thanks and lots of xoxoxo’s to Dan too for bringing his A-game and playing along. I know some of this frou frou stuff (”What do you mean I have to wear different outfits?!”) must be hard for the mens sometimes!

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.