Step One: Insert cats.

Step Two: Arrange flowers.

Step Three: Adjust lights.

Step Four: Snap away merrily.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

There is nothing quite like stuffing two cats in a small lightbox, poking them with long stemmed red roses, and pointing bright lights at them in an attempt to make a greeting card.

They climb on each other, climb out of the box, bite the roses, and pull the background down.

These two black and white cats, Hal and Mo, were actually quite cooperative. The lightbox was actually a small 2’x2’ cube, and I propped it on a table on the far side of the room because I was going to use my zoom lens on them.

The "zoom in!!" idea was necessary due to the odd lightbox- it had this strange small opening. If I wasn't stepping back all the way, it wouldn't let me see all the way in without showing the doorway. Not such a great design for a lightbox, that's for sure!

Since cats are normally inquisitive, it wasn’t hard to get them to smell the roses and sniff them appreciatively. At one point, Hal took a great big bite of the rose that was being shoved near his nose. I cracked up.

Cats always look like they're smiling when they fold their ears back half-way, close their eyes, and carefully poke their little pink noses into things.

Hal died two months after this shoot, and this photo was used in his memory. He was a beautiful tuxedo cat, with a deep Siamese sounding meow.

The cats put up with this odd treatment for about twenty minutes. I ended up taking about a hundred shots of them in that time, and I wasn't doing that fancy multishot thing, either. Point click, point click- voila! Kitties with roses!

Along the way, Mo decided to take a nap. This, actually, is one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken of a cat- and I’ve taken lots of pictures of cats!

None of the photos actually ended up being used as a greeting card, but apparently they did end up being quite a few people’s wallpaper.