Fat Orange Cat Studio is 1 year old

Here were my first paying clients of 2009, three cats named Tilly, Moxie and Truman. Technically, their session was at the end of Dec 2008, but I received my first glittering paycheck from the owner in Jan 2009, so I’m going with that.  I remember when I received that first check, made out to Fat Orange Cat Studio (eeee!), there was this huge jolt to the head that singed my eyebrows and rattled my teeth and sent my heart racing a million miles an hour. I was no longer just dabbling in photography for fun, for myself. I was skerred! Terrifed! My first reaction was to tear up that check and give her the prints for nothing, because I was sure that’s how much the prints were really worth, and apologize for pulling the wool over her eyes. A very sound practice to have, if your goal is to take your business and nosedive it straight into the ground.

{ Tilly, Moxie and Truman with my rudimentary logo }

And here is a sneak peek at the latest critter of 2010.

{ Sonny the pomapoo puppy }

The only unsound business practice I wanted to do this time was to run off into the woods with him stuffed in my mouth.

So yes, Fat Orange Cat Studio has turned one year old this month! I wish I had a hard date but I’m not sure what it is, having launched several times. I “soft launched” on Feb 5th 2009 but switched hosting providers almost immediately because the blog was running incredibly, incredibly slowly. I soft launched again a few days later but didn’t announce it to the world until I was sure things were running smoothly. I wrote a couple of posts and then officially announced on Feb 13 that the site was LIVE! Fat Orange Cat Studio was OPEN for BUSINESS!  (Okay duh maybe 2/13 should be my anniversary date.)  I announced this on another blog of mine I had been keeping, no I will not tell you where it is, and encouraged readers there to visit here and leave a question for me to answer so that I could have content for my very sparse About page. I received a ton of comments, my best college buddy in NYC sent over a bottle of champagne, Dan and I drank it and went out for a celebratory dinner, it was all very festive!

(Out of all the questions I received, I have only answered 10, eeps! I do plan on getting around to all of them though – many of which you can see in the comments here and here – and hopefully the last full year have given me more material to base my answers on…)

I’m not going to give the year’s round-down since I pretty much did that in my 2009 wrap-up post. Nor do I have a contest at the ready to celebrate. So instead I will be lame and just thank everyone again, so very very much, for helping make my first year such a wonderful and fulfilling experience! I feel so lucky to be doing this.