Felix by four

I was in the kitchen last Friday morning when I heard a purring sound and looked up to see a cat sitting on the window sill outside.  When he saw that I had seen him, he cranked up the cuteness factor about 10 fold and put on a begging performance that was almost, but not quite, worthy of being rewarded with the food he was most likely after.  Unlike most cats that are in our neighbourhood, he was quite friendly – in that when I went out to the back garden he came up to me and was quite playful.  He returned over the weekend a few times, and that allowed me get a few photographs of him.  I don’t know what his actual name is, but I call him Felix.

Photographing him wasn’t particularly easy – it’s not like I could get him to pose in a particular way, and he was constantly moving – but on occasion he did rest, like when I took this shot, which I think works well with a black & white treatment.  He is, afterall, a monochrome cat.

I had some fun experimenting with depth of field as I photographed him – well I say fun, I mean frustration.  I wanted a wide aperture to give a very narrow plane of focus and so was operating at f/2.8, but with a constantly moving cat, getting that plane of focus to be near the cat, let alone near his eyes, was tricky and there were far more unusable frames than usable ones.  This next one worked out nicely though.

It must have become obvious to Felix pretty quickly that I was more than happy for him to stay in the back garden… even if I didn’t feed him.  No doubt if I did that I’d never see the back of him. In this last shot, captured just as I went back into the house, I like the contrast of scale between him and the shed and fence surrounding him.

Maybe this is a new area of photography for me – cat photography.  It certainly presents challenges similar to photographing children, so taking photographs of Felix might be good practice – if he keeps visiting, that is.