Picture of the Day: Cat in a Bag

Photo by: Sangudo.

Last night, I got some new lighting equipment and I wanted to test it out. Since my wife rarely humors me, that left… the cats. The trouble with cats is that they don’t sit still and let you take their pictures, making it really hard to light them. So this morning I thought I’d look through the “Cats” tag on Flickr and pay homage to the patient photographer who caught a cat in a calm moment. In this case, the kitty is sitting in a bag, and it looks like the light is coming in from a kitchen window to camera right. The other problem with cats is that they like to get into tiny places that block out the light – like my kitten who wanted to jump in a box last night instead of chilling on the floor.

And, for the heck of it, here’s a picture I took of my kitten Finn last night while playing around with the new stuff.

This was lit with a single light, camera left about 45 degrees. I triggered it wirelessly with the Opteka radio triggers that I wrote about yesterday. I shot a Vivitar 285HV through the new Honl traveller8 softbox (which just came in the mail yesterday). At this point, Finn finally decided to cooperate and sit still on the pillow long enough for me to focus the camera…