Tag: Kitsune

I’m frustrated. We’re watching a movie called “a cat’s tale” also known as “cats: the movie”, a live action shot on video (gotta stay mobile to follow the cats in the story), and I think they did a pretty good job at telling a story with creatures that, well, are doing pretty much as they please.
I guess it’s all in the editing, and thank goodness for video, otherwise the cost of film would be astronomical.
Point is, they did a pretty good job of it. Personally, I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to take pictures of Tito and the demon Mazuzu. Tito… Tito, the inexplicably paranoid kitty. I saw him creep up on a dust bunny and suddenly beat the crap out of it as if it were an intruder… Same thing with drapes. I don’t even ask anymore.

I’ve taken to turning the camera on in another room because he sometimes (but not always) jumps nervously when he hears the electronic sound the camera makes. Yeah, he’s not exactly consistent about that.
Then he has to be approached in such a way that he senses me coming into the room, but not in such a way that he might think I’m about to move stuff (a big no-no which will send him scurrying). He is difficult enough to photograph in natural light, dark and jumpy as he is, but he also has an uncanny sense of the precise moment when the shutter’s about to close: he then closes his eyes or turns his head.
For every good picture we ever managed to take of him, dozens more were deleted.

Oh, but Mazuzu is something else.
First, we can’t use the flash because his eyes, his blue peepers, are sensitive to it and he shuts them or turns away. We’ve practiced and gotten him used to being photographed without it, again in natural light. Given that the apartment is relatively dark, these two are making us work at it… If I contort myself and manage to get positioned just right for a close up, he will turn and present his rear end. Or close his eyes, still. But 8 times out of 10, I get the rear. At times, he’ll smudge his nose against the lens.

Well, you know, what works in fashion ends up working in cat photography as it turns out. Load them up on catnip, turn the music up a bit, have someone rough-house them, petting them heavily while saying stuff like “work it Baby! Yeah, that’s right! Oh you like that?” And your subjects will squirm and mug for you…
If you want them to hold the pause, point the laser a few inches from their stoned – I mean impaired – noses and make it quick.
This. Is a lot of work…