Photo shoot for the cats

Iffy under the sheet, originally uploaded by Wahj.

Amazing what you can do with a D70, an SB 800 flash on remote, and a white sheet. K and I set up a little photo shoot in the living room, the plan being to get a "family portrait" of all three cats. I'll admit that this was probably too ambitious on my part - to think that we could get all three felines to co-operate for even the few seconds required to take a shot was, in retrospect, plainly hopeless. Retrospect arrived about 3 seconds into the attempt, with Patch going straight into the storeroom to hide, and Iffy and Twinkle getting into a fight the moment they were put on the sofa together.

Vitruvian Cat
Originally uploaded by Wahj.

Out of the 100 plus photographs, we edited down to 22, two of which are here. Iffy's shot has a nice luminosity to it, courtesy of the white sheet. The flash was positioned behind the sheet, and it channelled the light very nicely around her, highlighting along the way the grain of the wood and the texture of the fabric.

This shot of Twinkle puts me in mind of a feline version of da Vinci's The Vitruvian Man - but instead of the straightened limbs and geometric strictness of square and circle, we have the fluid lines of a cat's body, all curves and arches.