I’m a photographer. I have been since can remember, but got my DSLR just before I started high school. I quickly found my favorite thing to photograph was animals. Whether birds, alligators, or rabbits, anything that breathes and isn’t human fascinates me when I have my camera.
Lily is my Siamese cat. Their breed is known for getting very attached to one person and creating very strong bonds with them. I often refer to her as “the light of my life” because, ironically, she’s basically part of my shadow. She’s always happy to see me and is one of the most loving animals I know of. And, to top it all off, she has taught herself to do compression therapy when I have panic attacks, making it so they end within minutes instead of me suffering for several hours. So this project is a bit of an homage to our relationship.
The Concept
In its most basic form, the concept of this project is allowing myself to pick whatever colors and movements I feel would suit her in a given moment, and then allow her to just be herself for the camera. She’s usually very photogenic, so I wanted to use the long-exposure to capture the light effects while she posed in her usual photogenic style. I had a few ideas, including using fairy lights for a light streak effect and a halo, as well as somehow creating light wings and silhouettes from some form of colored light. I also liked the geometric neon-looking LED strips Leo Villareal did, and hoped to incorporate some abstract design into some of my pieces. However, everything other than the original ideas and inspiration would be left to experimentation.
The Fairy Lights
The first few weeks were focused on testing the concepts and the fairy lights. In my moquette, I realized Lily was much more playful and interactive in the photos than I anticipated for her to be. This allowed me to expand the project’s focus to include more interactive photos. And, while many of these turned out to be too blurry for the final product, they still allowed Lily and I to have fun and get some practice.
See more on this photo and the maquette here.
I also tested the best ways to keep her as still as possible for the full 2 seconds that the shutter was open. While most light art happens with slower shutter speeds, Lily being a cat meant that I had very little working time, not only with each shot, but with the shooting time overall. This meant my detail to area covered ratio was low, but I was still able to get both very detailed photos, as well as ones that had light all the way throughout.
See more on getting these photos here.
The Glow Sticks
A few weeks in, I discovered glow sticks are very good for creating consistently lit swaths in pictures. I used this to my advantage, getting the silhouette picture I wanted.
I then brought my friend Jacob over and got some help managing the camera, flash, lights, and cat. He had the genius idea to create a rainbow with the glowsticks. We then got these photos. The one on the left is inspired by the infamous toaster pastry space cat, Nyan Cat.
The following week, I was able to get one of my favorite images, which is the wing picture I initially set out on this project to get.
See more about getting these photos here.
Tying it Together
Finally, now that I had my final images, I decided to tie the project together in a collage. I went to Walmart and got a photo collage for 4×6’s. The original only had 4 landscape slots though, so I ended up getting two more matching frames and extending the collage to look like what is shown below.
I then added my photos, and had three portrait slots left, which ended up being perfect because I had been wanting to add some abstract pieces to my final product.
After putting everything in, I felt that the project was missing something, so I decorated it with the fairy lights I used in some of the pictures. Overall, I’m really happy with the final product.
