Photographing Cats at the Shelter

Photographing cats is different than photographing dogs. The cats are kept in four different rooms in Paws Atlanta in their Cat cottage. Typically, the cats will actually stay where they are and try to observed the area, if they are if you do not scare them or enticed to come play. This sometimes makes it easier to shoot than the dogs. Some may be friendly and come up to you. Above are two photographs from one of my first session photographing the cats (Holly on top and Frisbee on bottom) . One of the major difficulties in photographing the cats at the shelter is identifying the cat that needs to be photographed. Some of the care takers know the names of the cats and can point them out, but if the cat is new and there are a lot of new cats it is not possible. So this requires scanning the cats for the microchip. A lot of the cats do not like people running the scanner over the back of their neck where the microchip is placed so they will run as soon as you try to identify them. This can make for a fun time chasing a cat trying to get the scanner to read the microchip. Another issue with the photographing of the cats in the shelter is the light is not the best, for this reason I am glad to have what is called a full frame camera, which allows the photography in low light (using what is called high ISO) without a lot of noise. Even then I need to use a relatively slow shutter, so the cats need to be relatively slow or they will be blurred. One way around this is flash, but when I first started I was less willing to use flash on the cats. If I can avoid flash, I still avoid it as it can sometimes scare the cats.