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

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.

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!

I was going to let my short and sweet “Favorite Photos of 2009” be my year-end review but then I decided I was doing myself a big disservice by not documenting all that’s happened this year. Even though I have far to go, I did accomplish a lot in this my very first year of business.

I spent the last part of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 getting everything together for the launch of this business, and finally did so officially – by announcing it online – in Feb 2009. The rest of the month and March found us busy hitting the streets with some old-fashioned face-to-face marketing. We visited pet grooming salons, vets, pet boutiques and animal shelters. I say “we” because Dan had a huge hand in this. It was extremely hard for me to go about soliciting and making cold calls as I am normally extremely, very, painfully shy. There were a lot of nervous stammering and ineloquent pitches when talking to store owners about something as simple as leaving a stack of business cards! But was I in it to win it or not? It was time to work outside my comfort zone.

The first pet boutique I decided to was Pawsh in March, and this meeting proved very lucky as they were just organizing a second grand opening event in April, and invited me to photograph it. A TV camera came by and the back of my head made it onto the 10 o’clock news! The owners of Pawsh have continued to promote and to support my business and for that I am very thankful.

In March I also partnered up with the South End Buttery and photographed the owners’ dogs in exchange for some wall space in his cafe. I’ve had large-scale prints hanging there since April, including one round of updates. They have really really helped me drum up business. {By the way, there is a video review of the Buttery up on Boston.com, and some of my photos got the up-close camera treatment which I think is hilarious.}

Before I even had my first official client pet shoot, I was convinced to photograph a small wedding in March. I never gave weddings much thought – other than I didn’t want to pursue it! – so the fact that I nevertheless found myself building a small wedding portfolio alongside that of the pets was a huge surprise.

In April I started getting clients! My first client was the adorable 6 week-old puppy named Logan. Strangely enough even though it was the first “official” shoot as a launched business, it was also my most comfortable. All the practice the half year before on friends’ pets really paid off, and I thought it a sign that I really was meant to do this.

In May, I had a pet photography Q&A published in Gadgetwise, a personal technology blog of the New York Times. That was very. very. ex.ci.ting. And tangentially with that came a rather unenthusiastic mention on Gizmodo.com. My photos are deemed “OK.” Heh. My site hits go through the roof, I get tons of very nice and supportive emails…but no new client booking as a direct result. The NYTimes keep trying to sell me overpriced plaques of the article. I keep refusing but now I’m thinking, Why not?! I’m in the Times!

In May, June and July I started photographing more weddings as a second shooter for Lisa Rigby, and find myself enjoying it much more than I thought I would! So it’s really her doing that I’m getting into weddings.

In August I attended Cowbelly’s workshop on pet photography. Cowbelly is based in Seattle had has been in business for 6 years already. Keep up, Boston!

September to December turned out to be my busiest months. Along with an influx of pet shoots, I donated my pet session in a silent auction at the Urban Barn Dance and Harvest Supper, organized by the Massachusetts Farmers Market federation. I donated a session at another silent auction hosted by Pop’s Restaurant with proceeds going to the Animal Rescue League of Boston. There were events at Bark Place Spa and SOWA Open Studios both in the South End.

There was a NEW CAMERA.

There was also a lovely wedding, which was recently featured in IntimateWeddings.com, my first wedding feature ever! And of course I had a great time with my first engagement shoot.

The year has also been about meeting with fellow aspiring pet photographers in person: pet photographer April Ziegler of Philly, who also atttended Cowbelly’s workshop and stayed at our place, Alexis of Alexis Hall Photo, Maria Andrews of White Whiskers Photography, Abby Christensen of Lorenz Photography, and portrait photog Grace Benson.

It was also about collaborating with other artistic professionals in the wedding industry: Lisa Rigby of Lisa Rigby Photography, Jennifer Cox of Esq.Events wedding coordination services, Sarah Parrott of Parrott Design Studio paper goods, and Bryn Chernoff of Paperfinger calligraphy. She will be designing a wedding-ized version of the Fat Orange Cat logo, incorporating both calligraphy and hand-drawn elements. So excited for this!

So yes, I am officially getting into the wedding biz! I’ve just joined the My Kate Parker Wedding family as a vendor. Before you think I’m starting to become an all-purpose shooter, I plan on keeping my focus narrow.

One of my very favorite photographers is San Francisco’s Anna Kuperberg, who specializes in weddings and candid pet portraiture. In fact, I initially discovered her as a pet photographer, and it wasn’t until a friend attended a wedding photographed by Anna that I realized she was a pretty hot-shot wedding photog too! I’ve even seen some of her work on greeting cards. Ann Hamilton is another fantastic West Coaster who has made a name for herself as a wedding and pet photographer (isn’t her icon cute?).

So I think it’s high time Boston got a pet+wedding photographer as well!

And that, at long last, is the end of the 2009 year-end review. As always, thank you so very much to all the wonderful fellow pet lovers, and you the readers, for making 2009 successful beyond my wildest expectations! With the confidence and valuable experience I’ve gained over the last year, I dare to dream bigger and reach for higher goals in the new.

Fat Orange Cat Studio says hello to 2010!

xo,
Li, Dan, Bunny & Veebs

photos by Lisa Rigby