O, rejoice! ye who crave cat photos. I have heard your prayers, and I will provide. Am I not good?

Yes, the sun shone this morning, and its warmth lured me outdoors. With the cats. And the camera. And a wide-angle lens. Simon was none too happy, I’m afraid. After about ten minutes of me shoving the lens in his face (you’ve got to get really close with a wide-angle lens, otherwise you don’t get the photos you want), he started giving me warning yowls. I left him alone and photographed flowers for a while instead.

Nemo, as a Siamese, is restless. It’s difficult to get a photograph of him because he rarely stops moving. However, he did pause for a few moments today to soak up the sun:

Simon, too, is difficult to photograph. He’ll sit still, sure, but not if somebody’s paying attention to him. And pointing a camera at him counts as “paying attention”, which means it’s time to go get some lovin’…

Toto, on the other hand, is happy to sit still. Too bad she’s not photogenic. In her first photo, she looks almost sweet. Almost.

In the second photo, she demonstrates two important photographic principles. First, depth-of-field is influenced by both your distance to the subject and your choice of focal length. Second, film (and, in this case, a digital camera CCD) has a limited dynamic range: photographing a black cat in bright sunlight is never going to work because the camera just can’t capture the range of light.

I took more photos than this, obviously. You can find a few others on my Flickr page.