Rameses Tonkinese

My most recent pictures are of my Tonkinese, both those who live with me and those who were bred by me but now live elsewhere and are loved by their new owners. I think some of my best pictures are in this album, particularly the first one, which is on the cover of my book about Tonkinese.

Tonkinese photo album

Only a couple of pictures loaded so far. I haven't had many Burmese over the years, and most of my litters date from before the digital camera came into my life, but I bred a few litters after my first Burmese queen died. She had only had Tonkinese babies, and I regretted bitterly that I never mated her with a Burmese so that I had a Burmese baby to 'replace' her. However, I have had several lovely Burmese since, and these are some of them.

Burmese photo album

Quite a lot of pictures loaded now.

Siamese photo album

These are (mostly) cats who have visited, either by invitation, or from a desire to get to know my girls a little more intimately! There have been several stray or wild toms who turned up on the doorstep or took up residence in the garden. Usually it's clear from their condition (starving, sick and covered in abscesses from fights) that either they have no home, or their owners don't care about them enough to look after them, and they end up being looked after by me, though outside the house, for safety's sake.

Visitors

I had intended this new version of the website to be completely new, with none of the old pictures, but someone stumbled across the old version archived somewhere and said how much the liked the pictures, so here they are for posterity! It's nice for me to see these old pictures too - I haven't forgotten any of them.

Archive Photos

Fun with a new macro lens - in fact, not all these pictures were taken with a macro, several simply use a good zoom lens, but the detail on the better lenses is fantastic. As my eyesight deteriorates, I appreciate these views more and more: I used to be able to see in this sort of detail with my naked eyes, sadly that's not happening any more!

Up Close

These are mostly not of people but of places and things which caught my attention. I was fascinated by the difficulty in photographing flowers and plants with a compact camera, but got some amazing ones (as well as some boring by quite nice ones). The SLR makes it much easier, but I only recently started to carry that with me when I'm driving around and might get a good picture unexpectedly.

General album

I haven't done many portraits - these are also something that is quite difficult to do, and I want to spend more time getting it right. I hate posed pictures, and prefer to get away from the person I'm photographing and capture them with a zoom lens, when they're not thinking about the camera. At the moment I'm definitely better at cat portraits than human ones, but I get a lot more practice with those

Portrait album

Most of these were done many years ago, and the cats in them are long gone. But they remind me of them in a way that photographs don't, so I've put these here as much for me to look through as anyone else. It's a bit difficult to scan pencil drawings, but they're good enough (scans) to get the idea.

Drawings

This is a bundle of shots where I was looking at textures. Some are coats of the cats and others are taken from trees and plants in my garden, where the textures of leaves and bark looks amazing in closeup, and without other things around to distract the eye.

Textures

It's up: the trip of a lifetime on the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and back to celebrate my father's 75th birthday. I haven't captioned all the photos yet. Some were taken several times to try and get better focus or a tighter view, so there are some repeats. Many of the ones taken inside are fuzzy or otherwise oddly coloured, as it was quite dark, and we weren't allowed to use flash because of colour surviving on the walls, so it meant long exposures, and we were also in a crowd of tourists, jostling and constantly moving, so I couldn't stop and prop the camera against anything. I'll do the captions as I can.

Egypt