Photographing Cats
The internet is a wonderful way to get more cats adopted from your shelter. However, many people find it difficult to take pictures of their cats, a critical step to catching the attention of potential adopters. Without a good plan, pictures of your cats and kittens are likely to suffer from problems with exposure (photos too light or too dark), blurriness, bad backgrounds and "devil kitty" eye.
The first priority when planning your cat photos is good lighting. After that comes a neutral background and an OK or better camera. If you have good lighting and know how to use the camera you own, you shouldn't need a fancy camera to get good pictures of your cats.
You can get good lighting from several sources:
- Natural light
- Fancy flash
- Dedicated lighting
Natural light
Natural light is probably the best source of lighting, and one of the features that makes it easier to take good dog pictures. However, it doesn't address the issues of a neutral background or cat containment. If you have a large window, plain wall, and relaxed cat, like I did with Dexter (pictured to right), this can work well. This setup is most likely to be appropriate for animals in foster. Advantages:
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Fancy flash
An external flash coupled with a flash difuser will give you good lighting and help avoid "devil kitty" eye. This option offers great flexibility, and allows you to take pictures of cats anywhere under any lighting conditions. However, the lighting can be "flat", and an external flash and difuser are not only expensive, but also require an expensive camera. This picture of Dexter and Sinister was taken with a diffused flash. I use a lightsphere by Gary Fong.
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Dedicated lighting with the Cat Cube
I believe that this is the best way to get consistent, attractive photos of your cats and kittens. It incorporates good lighting, neutral background and cat containment in one setup. Importantly, it appeals to the cat's natural instinct to want to be in a contained environment. Except for curious kittens, cats tend to want to stay in the cat cube, finding it a safe environment. Most cubes come with a selection of several backgrounds so you can use different colors (put a white cat on a black background, for example), or swap backgrounds between cats to minimize the chance of disease transmission. Additional backgrounds are inexpensive.
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What exactly is a cat cube?
The cat cube is a nylon cube traditionally used for small product photography as it takes the place of a large studio for items small enough to fit inside. The cube is used to difuse inexpensive lighting. Kits which include lighting cost between $90 and $300 and fold down for transportation and storage. Edison is pictured here inside a cat cube. There are many, many options for photo cube kits. I personally own the DigPro 80cm Soft Lighting Studio and Kuhl light combo kit. The biggest problem will be getting enough light in the cube, so be sure to order the highest powered lights you can, and the smallest cube that will fit your animals (I use a 30" cube).
Cameras
While it is true that I would prefer to use an SLR when photographing cats, it is possible to get great cat pictures without using a fancy camera. As long as the lighting is taken care of, the camera becomes much less important. Most digital cameras manufactured within the past 5 years should be adequate. This does not include cell phones (yet)! It is more important to know how to use your camera than to have the latest and greatest model.
If you do plan to buy a camera, there are a few features which will be adventageous:
- > 5 megapixels, mainly so you have the option to crop
- optical image stabilization, to give you more options in low light (when not using the cat cube)
- "sports mode", to help get sharp pictures of a moving object
- TIFF or RAW format in addition to JPEG, to have an archival copy
Post Production
The handling of your photos after you take them is almost as important as how you capture them. Photos of your animals are an asset. They can be used to create marketing materials, fundraising items, etc. It is important to store them in a way that lets you find them again. Technically this is called DAM (digital asset management), but all that means is that you should be keeping your images in a single location and rating, captioning and categorizing them so you can quickly locate individual images in the future. The other reason is that there are many basic improvements you can make to your photos which will make a big difference in the quality of their presentation. I think Adobe Photoshop Elements is a good package for both PC and Mac which offers a good number of features while being relatively inexpensive.
Typical post production includes
- Cropping
- Cropping almost always makes a picture better. For most cats, it may be best to crop one or two of your pictures to just show the face, the part of the cat most likely to attract attention.
- Saving an appropriately scaled version for your web marketing efforts
- Adjusting exposure
- Sharpening
Size Matters
Petango: 155px by 155px
Petfinder: 75px x 50pxby