In Which the Pirate Offers a Feline Friday.
Still hanging out with the cats. It’s a lot easier for me to sit on the couch and take pictures of them than to hide out in my room and knit while they cry at the door. That’s what I tried to do yesterday – I came home from work, stretched and took the bike out for an almost-ten mile ride (woo!), showered and made dinner (fried egg on a waffle, peanut butter cookie, glass of scotch), and then shut myself in my room and felt guilty about it, so I kept going out to pet them and got only a few rows of knitting in. I have a hard time resisting their pleas for attention:
*scratch scratch scratch*
*paw thrust under the door*
Floyd: Mrow? Now? Mrrrt-owwwow. Mew-ew?
*scratch scratch*
Kipling: Roo? Rr rr ook ook. Rrroo?
Floyd really hates having his picture taken for some reason. Either that, or he just likes to be a jerk. He’ll hold still while I get the camera up and in focus, and turn his head at just the right moment. I’ve even turned off the shutter sounds, so I have no idea how he knows exactly when to turn away. Three dozen attempts or more, and I only ended up with a few usable pictures. Perhaps a faster camera would help… but I was able to catch this shot of him when he came out of hiding to see what was going on.
Kipling, on the other hand, is getting more and more lovey. Here he’s wedged himself in between my leg and the couch pillow, and when I reached down to pet him he squirmed around until he was on his back, paddling his paws in the air, wriggling in purrful delight at the attention. This is how we manage to keep his claws trimmed – when he gets in a bellyrub kind of mood, one of us will keep scritching and the other will catch a paw and do the trimming. He barely notices! Floyd is resigned to letting us do whatever we want to him, but Kipling isn’t nearly as malleable.
They are both talkative cats, Floyd more so than Kipling, but at least Floyd knows how to meow. Kipling sounds a lot like a little monkey sometimes. “Ook ook, roo?” The closest he seems to get to “meow” is a demanding raspy bark for his food dish…
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Dijjit does the same thing with the camera. Even with the iPhone, and that surely doesn’t have the same camera parts as a normal camera, right? Cats are mean.
I’m also using my phone’s camera. It takes reasonably decent shots, for a phone, but it’s a little slow on shutter response. I do have a Canon point-and-shoot, but Pirate-Husband has borrowed it for the job he’s working on.
She’s even worse with the digital camera. It’s why most of my shots of her are when she’s asleep.
Floyd is very smart to turn away at just the right moment. The flash will blind him:) My big dog always looks so nicely at the camera and then blinks like crazy after the flash goes off and acts like it’s the first photo he’s ever had done.
Kipling is beautiful with the stripes and spots.
I almost never use the flash when I take pictures of the cats, especially Floyd – first because they hate it, and secondly because it will blow out the colours of their coats. I try to get daytime pictures, and then I take it into Photoshop to adjust the levels and sometimes the colour balance.
Same here. Flash is always off when I try to take a picture of the cat. I don’t really want glowing eyes ruining my pictures, anyway. :) Plus, my iPhone doesn’t even HAVE a flash.
Kipling is such a pretty cat, he looks like a mini-leopard in that picture.