Sometimes the photographs you like the most are the unplanned ones.

Here, I was shooting a set of portraits of Kelli wearing blue jeans and a Union Jack t-shirt. White doors as a backdrop, strobe into a shoot-through umbrella, some digital, some on film. Brody and Chester decided they wanted in on the action and since everything was in the same place relative to the lighting, I went ahead and made this photograph.

Lucy staying still long enough to be manually focused at.

I’m getting quite fond of shooting 35mm film with manual focus primes, it has to be said. The Canon FD 50/1.4 is a nice little lens, and on the F-1 minus the motor drive makes for a fairly compact, balanced setup. It makes me think about the shot I’m trying to make. That’s a good thing for me right now.

Furthermore, I happen to like film grain. Not so much that I’d deliberately add it into all my shots in post, but I’m not going to run screaming from it either. Then again I think the Nikon D70, shot RAW, with good color noise reduction and no luminance noise reduction, makes perfectly fine images at ISO 1600, so I’m probably just strange.

Very close-up shot of Chester, our orange tabby. Shortly after this photo was taken (it was one of many attempts) he tired of having a lens shoved in his face and turned 180 degrees to tell me exactly what he thought of my photographic efforts!

Our cat Lucy looking regal (something that cats tend to do rather well) in soft window light. I liked the way the light fell off, highlighting her face naturally.