Jasmine has just made mincemeat of intolerance!

Say a group of ignorant people by the name of the Australian Christian Lobby were doing their utmost to prevent some of their fellow Australians from being able to legally marry the person of their choice. If this was the case, you might want to bring attention to the backward thinking of this group by a bit of poking fun at them, as humour is a great weapon deployed against bigotry and intolerance.

Well, as you might have guessed, this is not really a hypothetical. A group of quick-thinking Australian ladies found that the Australian Christian Lobby, while registering the domain www.acl.org, neglected to register the domain “australianchristianlobby.org”. This was a good teaching moment, and the website for the Australian Cat Ladies was born. Their group seeks to fight intolerance, and promote cats.

I cannot stand self-righetous bigotry masquerading as “family values”, so I thought the Cat Ladies’ coup was just great, and quickly sent off an application to join them. As a newly-minted Australian Cat Lady, I wanted to produce some visual material that might appeal to them to feature on their website. Inspired by their logo, the idea of the kitty rainbow flag shoot was born. I asked our friends Tanya and Mike if they would consider lending a hand (and a cat) to the effort.

After feasting like royalty on a great risotto Mike and Tanya  made, we set to work. Jasmine, the little cat shown in these photos, is  a Bengal (which is not a cheap cat to purchase, although they will work for cheap for catnip).

Anyway, here you go: the lighting diagram for what we did, followed by the shots!

We had to use two diffusers to get even lighting across the flag, as the flag itself was thin and quite translucent. It might be easier to just shoot a green background and add the flag afterward, but this time we shot it as is.

Here is Mike setting up the second diffuser. Photo by Tanya!

The major challenges of this shoot were balancing the lights and following the quick moving Jasmine. I may try to re-shoot this, or something similar (insects maybe?).  I believe in the rights of all people to live their lives as they see fit, and if my photography can do some good, I am glad of it. I hope you enjoy the shots, and if you are inspired by this, please do stop by the Australian Cat Ladies website to show them your support.