I'm super excited to once again participate in a monthly blog circle of storytelling photographers from around the world. Please be sure to check the end of the post and follow the circle to see everyone's ideas and images for the month of April. For those of you who know me and my family, you know that we do NOT have a cat. Growing up there were two cats in my family, both calico, loving, high shedding, allergy inducing cats. I did love them, but over the years I'd by lying if I said I loved everything about having cats (those darn allergies!!). But, as my kids are growing the conversations about wanting a dog or cat have been increasing in frequency, but our overseas expat lifestyle with frequent travel has kept my husband and myself quite reluctant about adding a furry friend to our family. So, when we were approached by a good friend to cat sit for a month we decided that now was as good a time as any to have a cat in our home and see how it went.

Needless to say, our children LOVED having Sassy Cat (isn't her name awesome!?) as our temporary visitor. On the day she was due to depart I realized that I only had quick iPhone snaps of Sassy, and so I set up a scenario for her to interact with my youngest daughter. I put my daughter in a little rocking chair to keep her in place, set them in front of a window to isolate them, gave her a bag of snacks, and watched the magic happen.

I decided to shoot this with the background overexposed to then properly expose for Sassy and my daughter, rather than shoot a silhouette image. I thought that retaining some details in the cat and what they were doing was important. Also the negative space really draws your eyes to the subjects, who are placed in the lower right third of the image.

This was shot with my Canon 5D Markiii and Canon 24-70 f2.8ii with settings of ISO600, f2.8, 1/400 and @33mm.

I did attempt to capture their reflections fully in the frame for a few shots, but it just didn't end up working out quite as well as I'd hoped. And literally within three frames and two seconds that bag of snacks was dumped all over the floor, my daughter was in shock and the cat was like 'what is going on'? and also in shock. But don't they look so cute? A little kitty anticipating a snack from her little friend.

Thank you for reading about the how and why in my above image, and next check out the Storytellers blog post of Nicole Sanchez of Virginia here, and see what storytelling image she has shared this month. Thank you for reading and please don't forget to follow the circle all around!!