Shooting from the hip

I was just fooling around with J-cub on the sofa this morning, playing phonecalls (J-cub picks up anything - a remote control, Jemaine, a book - and clutches it to his neck/ear area. I do the same, and we have a 'chat'.), and I started taking photos without looking through the viewfinder. I read about doing this when I was learning how to use my Fisheye camera, but have never tried it with my normal camera. I'm so happy with the photos I got, they're much more natural and really capture the feel of our day.

In this photo, I'm sitting next to J-cub, but holding the camera out in front of us. He's looking at me, chatting away. I love love love this photo.

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Today's Look Up photo comes with courtesy from Maeby, who was having a loving-us (rather than an indifferent-to-us) morning. Maeby is the special one, out of the two cats. She's very shy, and doesn't really understand that she's a cat, and likes to do things like stare at walls for hours on end and hide under blankets when she's scared (which is most of the time). She's named after a character from our most favouritest TV show of all time, Arrested Development, although her name is purposefully misspelt so as to not confuse vets (who would pronounce Maebe either Mayb or Mave).

When she decides that actually, we're not scary giants after all, and might be worth paying a bit of attention to, she suddenly morphs from crazy, haughty, I'm-not-looking-at-you into OhMyGODIloveyousomuchcanIhaveacuddlepleasenownowSTROKEME! She expresses this by miaowing quietly (the rest of the time she is entirely silent), trying to get as close to your hands as possible and reaching up to make stroking movements with her paw (with claws fully extended - it's quite scary). I managed to catch her in full pleading mode here. Isn't she pretty?