While Mother's away, the Cat will play!
by
scalvertComment: To those who wondered how I found the time to do something like this... well, I didn't. Like several other photos I've entered, the original idea was pretty simple and it kind of snowballed as I went along. I already had the [borrowed] hat, gloves and goldfish. The plan was to get the latex cat nose and a fishbowl, put on some quick face paint and just do a closeup of the bowl balancing on a rake. Plans rarely go as scripted, though, and that's when I have to wing it.
To give you an idea of a typical problem, there's the whiskers. The cat nose piece didn't have whiskers, and it looked dumb without them. Hmm... I pulled some bristles out of a billiard table brush, but they were too fine to show up in a photo. I thought of using pieces of a broom, but then I'd have to paint them and they're probably too stiff to look right anyway. I still had one of the "mini lights" I made for Langdon's Birthday challenge on my desk and the wires were about the right thickness. It took me a little while to get them untwisted. Perfect! I thought it would be a simple matter of attaching them to the cat nose with hot glue. Nothing is ever simple. There wasn't enough surface area with just the end of the wire to hold the whisker out straight, so I bent each wire into a small circle at the end perpendicular to the wire itself. The black paint spots camouflaged the ends. Problem solved... or so I thought. The hot glue wouldn't adhere to the paint. I tried to poke holes in the mask, but it was too tough, and I didn't want to take it off and start over. I finally scraped off a patch of paint with a razor blade for each spot and glued the wires in place. They were still fragile, and I was missing a whisker in about half the shots.
Up until a few hours before the shoot, I had no idea what I was going to do for the bow and outfit. I assumed there would be lots of Seuss hats, and anything that looked fake would be the weakest link. Thank goodness for learning how to sew in 5th grade "Home Economics" class! ;-)
The biggest obstacle of all was getting everything positioned. The book and bowl were both hanging from fishing line and would spin wildly at the slightest touch. The book had to be at just the right angle to see that it was open, and the fish had to face the camera directly or it would look too narrow. At the same time, I had to worry about glare from the lights on both of them (a polarizer helped). Then there was me... I needed to be simultaneously touching the book and the bowl while only looking at one of them and trying to keep them from spinning... and also tilt my head to show the full height of the hat (it was too short on most of the shots). Oh, and I had to do this on my knees to get the camera angle right. Last but not least, I had to maintain a fun expression throughout the shoot. Not easy considering this particular frame was taken at 3:30am, and I was tired when I
started.
So you see... it's not that I planned to put this much effort into the shot. It's just that I wasn't going to waste the props after spending time and money to make them, and I wanted to make sure I got it right the first time because I CERTAINLY wasn't going to set it up again. It was a simple matter of being stubborn!
Message edited by author 2007-05-14 22:39:33. 
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