Meet the team behind the lens…
Helmi Flick began her career in cat photography at an age when most people are counting down to retirement. She was 55 years old when she decided to do what most people only dream of – earn a living doing what she loved. Recently, in 2020, Helmi and her husband Ken, who work as a team, celebrated their 20th year, shooting cats. Helmi does the camera work while Ken does the lighting and wrangles the cats into poses.
“When we set up to shoot at our first cat show in 2000,” Helmi said, “that was the dawn of the digital era and all of the established cat photographers were still shooting with the film cameras they started out with. I knew from trying to shoot our own cats at home with a film camera that that wasn’t for me. The instant feedback of digital photography enabled me to see my mistakes immediately and learn from them. So I was the only one shooting digital back then. Ken had been a producer of corporate audio-visual work and had a good grasp of studio lighting. He also built our staging gear for cat portraiture. And, with no one to mentor us, we just worked out our techniques as we went along.”
The second way Helmi and Ken did things differently from their cat photographer colleagues was that they were virtually the only ones who did not work alone. “I certainly respect those who do work by themselves, Helmi says, “but I know I could not get the quality of images that we do without Ken doing the wrangling. We’re a team.”
Lighting is a third way that the Flicks’ do things differently. “From the beginning,” Ken says, “our approach to lighting was a very traditional one. We use the classic four-light setup – key light, fill light, hair or fringe light and background light -- that studio photographers have always used when shooting glamor models as well as celebrity and executive portraits.”
“Our goal,” Helmi says, “is to make every cat we photograph look and feel like a celebrity, and beyond coaxing the cat into a series of ideal poses on an appropriate background color, flattering lighting is the key element. I can understand how cat photographers who work alone and often fly to cat shows don’t want to deal with transporting and setting up all of the extra staging and lighting gear we use, but there are two of us to share the extra work and we believe the look we’ve achieved is worth the effort.”
Their work has a signature look that’s admired throughout the cat world and outside of it. Helmi is the only cat photographer in the U.S. to have been profiled by a major photography magazine, Popular Photography, the most widely-read photography magazine in the world.
Helmi and Ken live in Hernando, Florida, with their two cats: a Maine Coon and a Ragdoll-Somali mix. They have a small photo studio in their home but capture most of their cat images at cat shows around the United States and occasionally abroad. Helmi's images have been published in books and magazines on every continent, except Antarctica.