Volunteering Our Services
You know what we haven't done in a really long time? A blog post.
So here's an update as to what we're up to. We lost Lokey recently and from our grief and emptiness came a longing and action. Within days of losing our beloved cat, we were reaching out to the local cat shelter Catmandu which happens to be in the same neighborhood where we first took Lokey off the streets and into our lives. We offered our services and went out once a week for three weeks to photograph their many cats. We also took home two cats who are super adorable but that isn't what I'm here to talk about right now.
Our first session was great! The images were good - significantly better than most of the images they had on their petfinder. Our second session was better - we focused on cats we'd missed or got mediocre pictures of. By the end of our second session we had good images of all of their cats who weren't hiding under/in things. Linda and any volunteers who saw the images were extremely excited by the images and we were extremely happy to give the cats better profile images. We also had a small handful of excellent images worthy of posting on our front slideshow.
For our third session, however, we went in with a knowledge of the various cats and who was friendly and who was skittish. We went in with an off-camera flash and a softbox. We took significantly fewer images that we'd taken before because many of the cats were scared of the softbox. The ones who weren't however . . . We came out of that session with some phenomenal images that I just can't get over.
Since we've photographed all the cats we can reasonably photograph at Catmandu for now, we've begun to reach out to some of the other rescues in the area. We really want to help get some animals adopted and hopefully soon you'll see more rescues in our pet portrait album.
If you're interested in adopting a cat (or few) I do recommend checking out Catmandu. Their facility is awesome and everyone is very nice and helpful. The facility is cageless so the cats can hide or come out as the please and interact with other cats and the volunteers. The personalities come out a lot more in this environment than when they're locked in sterile cages. I can say from experience, though, that even in this facility, the cats are not as wonderful as will be when they are in their forever home, so don't let the shy ones pass you by.
The below slideshow is only images from our third session, but we did get some other great shots so make sure to check out our full set of Catmandu images.
