Inkbase

Mel, my cat, cross-processed for kicks | JasonLandry

So, it’s late and I’m tired, but I want to get this website up and running publicly before I attend Northern Voice in the morning. I just don’t feel right going to a blogging conference without a working blog. Thankfully, I had much of the work done before Christmas and, although there is a lot more I hope to do, I think the site is finished enough to release to the wild.

I’ve had this site and published to it now and again since 1999, but its heyday was in 2000—people outside of my family actually visited it and I was getting linked here and there. The golden years were short lived though. I got busy with other things, didn’t have a computer at home and had countless other excuses. I attempted to get things going again, but they never made it anywhere. Until now.

I hope.

It’s 2005, many things have changed and, well, I’m in the mood. So, what should I write about for my first post on the new website? It needs to be clever, witty and should set the tone for the posts to come. Unfortunately, I’m not a very good writer, so you’ll get a post about my cat instead.

His name is Mel, he’s 19lbs and he gets sick on our carpet whenever he eats beef—which, interestingly enough, can sometimes be found in cat food labeled as ’seafood’. He started visiting us in 2000, moved in shortly afterwards and then officially became ours when his owners realized we had stolen him and that Mel didn’t seem to mind. He spends his days sleeping on the couch and his nights trying to wake us up. He’s pretty good at both.

As you can see, he’s a fairly good subject to photograph. He doesn’t make any stupid faces or blink at the sound of a shutter and he has no problems doing nudes. We’ve taken many photos of him in the past, but this is my recent favourite. It was taken with a Canon EOS Elan II with Fuji Velvia 50 film stock that I had cross-processed into prints. I’ve always wanted to try my hand a cross-processing, but I never seemed to get around to it—whoa, wicked deja vu.

Anyway, over the holidays, my fiance and I decided we were going to shoot some slide film and experiment with it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just shot some photos and took them to The Lab to have them processed. For the most part, the results weren’t great, but I got a few I liked and it’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about my own photography. I’m so excited, in fact, that the photo above also became my first photo upload to my flickr account. Two cat uploads in one day… it’s starting to feel like 2000 again.

19 Feb 2005 |