Waiting Her Turn

Ashton: After our cold days, it’s open-window weather again, and that means hanging out on the porch!

one-eyed brown tabby cat looks toward light source

Ashton: * SNIFF * Oh, that outside air smells so good! It’s tome for some serious rolling around on the concrete.

one-eyed brown tabby cat looks toward open door

Pierre: Excuse me, coming through. I get to go out onto the porch first because I’m the oldest.

Gray tabby cat passes one-eyed brown tabby cat on the way out the door

Ashton: Wait a minute. I haven’t ever heard of this “older cats get to go first” rule before. Is this a real thing?

one-eyed brown tabby cat makes a face

Newton: Of course it is!

Ashton: But —

Orange tabby cat photobombs

Newton: Make way, I’m on my way out. I’m older than you are, too, Ash.

one-eyed brown tabby cat watches orange tabby cat exit

Ashton: I would remember if this happened before. They’re both making this up.

one-eyed brown tabby cat sits by open doorway

Ashton: At it’s my turn now. Unless there are some other neighborhood cats who are going to crowd out there before I can get to the porch.

one-eyed brown tabby cat looks annoyed by doorway

Ashton: Finally!

Brown tabby cat on porch

Laugh. Learn. Love Cats. #2016PetBloggerChallenge

Every year, our friends at Go Pet Friendly host the Pet Blogger Challenge, where they pose a series of questions to the pet blogging community. This year, the head peep is participating on our behalf, since we kitties have important naps to take care of. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about what goes on behind the scenes here at the blog, too!

1. How long have you been blogging?

I have been blogging here since May of 2011. Hey, that means we’ll have a five-year blogaversary to celebrate this year, doesn’t it? Time flies when you’re having fun with your friends, and I really have made wonderful friends during that time through this blog.

And, for anyone who is visiting for the first time, please give a quick description of the subject of your blog.

Sometimes Cats Herd You’s slogan is “Laugh. Learn. Love cats.” because it’s a site sharing both entertainment and education about all things cat. We like to share some of our adventures around the house with you. Like any other household of three cats, there is always some mischief going on!

Orange tabby cat extends paw to touch gray tabby cat

We also share information on our weekly Topical Thursdays posts, which cover topics like cat wellness, safety, and animal rescue.

2. What is the one thing that you accomplished during 2015, either on your blog or because of it, that made you most proud?

I think the blog-related thing I’m proudest of accomplishing is being published on someone else’s blog. At the very end of 2015, I became a contributing writer to Catster. It was a great next step for me after writing for my own blog for so many years.

On the blog itself, the thing that makes me proudest is every time someone takes time to comment and tell me, “I didn’t know that.” On days when I feel like I’m writing posts like I’m stating what feels like the obvious because I have known something for a long while, it feels good to know that a reader learned something and that their cat hopefully benefited from it, too.

Ashton exits paper bag

3. Which of your blog posts was your favorite this year and why?

My favorite blog post this year is one I wrote when I got tired of hearing all the misinformation in the press about how your cats are going to give you mental illnesses through toxoplasmosis: Your Cat Isn’t Going to Make You Crazy. It’s one of my favorites because I was able to take frustration that was negative energy and make something positive out of it. Now, when I see someone sharing the same, tired misinformation, I have something handy to share in return that explains not only the correct information but where the misinformation came from in the first place.

I think the cats have had the most fun with the blog posts about Ashton’s Chicken Emporium. Some of the strangest things have come into the house for them to investigate as a result of that series of posts. Big thanks to the readers who have continued to urge Ashton to pursue her dreams.

Newton eyes egg-laying chicken

4. What is one thing you’ve done in the past year that has brought more traffic to your blog?

Blog traffic is hard because there are a lot of things I won’t do that are good for traffic. My rule of thumb is that if it annoys me to see someone else doing it, I won’t make someone else see me doing it to promote my blog. I am 100% sure this means my site’s traffic could be higher, but it leaves my self-respect intact.

I could give you a list of things I tried in 2015 that didn’t do a thing for my traffic. One thing that did work was posting exclusive content about celebrities or public figures. Both my interview with Jackson Galaxy and the post featuring front-row photos from local the Acro-Cats performance drew a lot of views. I can’t imagine writing an entire blog on the coattails of cat celebrities, but I was surprised at the difference that having some of those posts in the mix made.

5. Which of your blog posts got the most traffic this year? Why do you think it was so popular?

The most traffic this year by far came from my Q & A with Jackson Galaxy. It was popular because it got shared to his Facebook page, which has an enormous following. That was a quick cluster of traffic that came and went, and that post doesn’t see much traffic now.

gray tabby cat looks at ipad

The post that sees a lower but surprisingly steady level of traffic is Don’t Eat That: Almonds, which was originally published in 2014. It continues to bring traffic because there’s so little information about whether almonds are toxic to cats or not elsewhere on the internet.

6. What is one blog that you read religiously – other than your own – and what makes you such a devoted reader?

I read so many blogs, I don’t think I can narrow it down to just one I read all the time. I’m kind of a RSS-aholic, and I have 430 blogs in my feed reader. I enjoy the firehose of information I can fine-tune by setting up my blog reader to pour all of this information over me. This lets me keep track of what’s going on in the world of everything from cats to computers.

Newton with book

7. What resources do you rely on to enhance your technical, writing, photography, social media, or other skills that improve your blog?

I’m a geek at heart, so if I have time, I enjoy learning about what I need to do to keep my blog humming along. Since they are all technical questions, I find that Google can usually bring me the answers when I run into a head-scratching error, so I haven’t used one definitive source for helping grow those skills. If I was less of a hands-on “let’s try this!” type, I’m sure I would have a bookshelf of things to teach me the basics, but I often don’t look up how to do something until I am halfway through and get lost.

In my incredibly long blogroll are a couple dozen about writing and social media, and I tend to take their advice on a “take it or leave it” basis. As an old-timer on the internet from before this newfangled world wide web, I have a low tolerance for marketing hype, and I won’t do things that would annoy me as a reader.

Pierre behind the camera

Photography skills are still very much a work in progress for me. I have learned a lot from the Digital Photography School site, and when I can find time, I want to take some classes on Lynda.com that are more in-depth. PSA: My public library lets me take classes from Lynda for free, so check to see whether your local library has a membership. You could save some money on useful classes.

The biggest resource I have is my fellow bloggers. When I have a question, bouncing them off of a circle of fellow bloggers who have also been there often finds the quickest and most thorough answer of all.

8. What is the best piece of advice you can offer other bloggers?

Don’t blog just to make money. Making money is a great goal, but blogging takes a lot of time. If you’re going to devote that much of your time to something, make sure it’s something you really enjoy. It’s easy to lose track of why you enjoyed blogging in the first place.

Newton_money_wm

9. What is your vision for your blog in 2016? Do you have specific goals?

2015 was the year of throwing things at the wall to see if they worked. 2016 will be the year of adjustments based on the things I learned.

One of the things I learned is I’m spending too much time blogging to be able to also pursue outside writing projects. Not if I want to sleep or find time to play with my cats, who are already getting a little impatient with me. This is the year to find the new balance that works better than it is today.

gray tabby cat sleeps in crumpled sheets

10. You have the attention of the pet blogging community – is there one blogging challenge you’d like help with, or one aspect of your blog that you’d like input on?

Since I’m struggling with the need find 30 hour days, I’d like to hear how other bloggers manage their time, especially if you’re juggling a demanding day job or other big obligations, too. Did you clone yourself? Seriously, folks, I’d love to know how everyone else makes it look so easy!

Before I wrap up this post and hand the blog back over to the cats, I want to extend a big thanks to Amy at Go Pet Friendly for hosting the Pet Blogger challenge. I met Amy at Global Pet Expo, where she went out of her way to be sure she met me and make me feel included in conversations in the pressroom. It’s no wonder she’s doing the same thing to help bring the pet blogging community at large together. Thanks, Amy!

Cat Photography Tips, Part 2

If you were reading along last week, I posted some tips for your cat photography about lighting. I’m not really a photographer. I didn’t even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night! But I have taken enough photos of my own cats to know some of what works… and I can talk about it on a fairly nontechnical basis to other hobbyists like you.

My remaining tips for your cat photography:

Have your camera handy

Cats sleep 18 hours a day. They also have short attention spans a lot of the time unless food is involved. That means if your camera is put away in a safely locked cabinet inside a difficult-to-open case, by the time you fetch the camera to take a photo, the precious moment you wanted to capture is long gone. Protecting your camera is great unless it keeps you from using it for taking the pictures you want to get!

So get your camera out of storage and have it where you can grab it to take a quick photo when the cute happens. When I’m home on the weekend during the hours where my house has decent natural light, my camera is usually on my desk where it’s easy to access.

This also means anticipating. Before I started to set up my Christmas tree this year, I put my camera on a table in the room where I was assembling the tree. That’s how I caught Pierre shopping through the box of ornaments.

Make magic moments happen

Okay, I’m not going to lie here. My cats are mostly lazy. If Ashton didn’t have to walk from where she sleeps to the food bowl, she probably wouldn’t get any exercise at all if she had anything to say about it. Sometimes I look over the photos I’ve taken recently only to realize “Hey, they’re just sitting around!”

To get your kitties moving, take advantage of the curiosity cats are known for: Grab something unusual and put it in the middle of the floor, and don’t let your cat into the room until you’re ready with the camera. You may only have 30 seconds or a minute, but that first inquisitive exploration of a new thing is golden.

Bonus tip: If you can, put the object somewhere between you and the entrance door. If the kitty enters the room from beyond the new object and approaches it, you’ll be viewing her from the front or side. If your kitty walks past you to see the object, you’re going to be seeing her tail, which probably isn’t the end you prefer to photograph. Newton and Ashton demonstrate:

Get down on their level

A cat’s world is at their eye level. When you take photos of them from your standing height, you tend to look down at them and not see their face or their line of sight, which makes the image less engaging. To enter a cat’s world, try getting down flat on the floor and view the world from their perspective. It’s a lot easier to see your kitty’s face, and even if they aren’t facing you, you may be able to capture the intensity of your kitty’s expression as he focuses elsewhere.

Clear up the background

Since so much cat photography is indoors, what’s in the background of the photo is even more important than in outdoor photos, especially if you don’t have a fancy camera. When you take a photo of a dog — or anyone else — standing in a field and you focus on the subject, pretty much all cameras will consider the stuff on the other end of the field as outside of the focus range, so you get a pleasing, out-of-focus effect for the background.

Inside, walls are closer than a line of trees across a field, so with many cameras, your background doesn’t soften into as much of a pleasing blur. Consider trying to photograph your cat in front of a plain or uncluttered background to avoid it becoming a distraction.

Speaking of distractions, but take a hard look the stuff in the background when you’re photographing your cat. Try to look through a stranger’s eyes. You may not normally pay attention to that pile of towels you set aside to donate to your favorite shelter next week. The person looking at a photo of your cat sitting in front of those towels is going to think “why isn’t that cats climbing Mt. Towelmore?” instead of thinking about how cute your cat is. Keep them focused on the cute!

Less-busy backgrounds in photos aren’t just more appealing to the eye, they’re also a lot easier to manipulate in your photo editing software if you decide to do that later.

Take a lot of photos

I’m always surprised when someone says they took a photo of their cat and it didn’t come out. You took just one photo? Were you worried about how much it was going to cost at the Fotomat to develop it? In our digital age, you can discard photos you don’t like, so don’t be shy about taking plenty. You can always delete them later! A professional photographer wryly called this approach “spray and pray,” but it usually yields my best results. As a non-professional photographer, I can’t be trusted to make a masterpiece on the first shot, and it’s not unusual for me to download 200 photos from a single session with the cats… and keep 5 or 6.

Here’s a screenshot of a folder of unprocessed folders. You can tell from the thumbnails that I take multiple variations of nearly everything!

If you are catching your cat in action, like playing actively with a toy, use the burst mode on your camera to take several photos in rapid succession. Even smartphones are making burst mode available on their cameras. This allows you to to not have to wait for that exact, right instant to snap a photo. Instead, you have a series of freeze-frame photos of the action to choose from.

Hopefully these tips have given you some ideas about things you may not have been doing in your photography that help you capture the photos you want of your kitty.

CC image courtesy usfotografie on flickr

Cat Photography Tips: Lighting

Last week, our friends from the Daily Pip said in the comments, “Although I am OK at photographing our dog Ruby, I can never seem to get good shots of the cats. Any basic tips you would like to send my way, I would appreciate.”

I don’t consider myself much of a photographer, but I’ve taken a ton of photos of my cats and cat-related things for this site. My knowledge is your knowledge, so this is the start of a two-part series on cat photography tips.

Today’s post is all about my number one tip for better cat photos:

Have enough light for your camera

This is the most important thing about better photos of your cat, especially if you have a black or dark-colored cat. Ashton’s thickly marbled sides show up as a nearly-black blob without sufficient light, so I think of this every time I get out the camera.

I wish I could give a yardstick of exactly how much is enough, but it really depends on what kind of camera you’re using. Different cameras need different amounts of light to get a good image. If you don’t have enough light, photos look grainy because your camera’s sensor starts to group pixels together together to try to capture more light. Generally speaking, more expensive cameras have bigger sensors, which are better at gathering light, so they give less grainy images. In the examples below, the photo on the left was taken with an iPad Mini 2 and the photo on the right was taken with a Nikon D5300.

You can see there’s a lot more grain on the image on the left, especially on the wall where the color doesn’t appear uniform as it does on the photo on the right. In better-lit photos, the grain is much less noticeable.

You may be able to compensate for the lack of light if you have a camera that has a setting specifically for low light or by manually raising the ISO, but you’re better off just making sure you have enough light to begin with. Do a little experimenting to see how much light your camera needs before your photos start to look grainy.

Now, where can you get that much light for photos of your cat? This is one way that photographing dogs is probably easier, since dogs are often outside in abundant, natural light. If you’re trying to take a picture of an indoor cat, you have to rely on the light in your house. There’s a reason why nearly every photo you see on my blog is taken in one room of my house: I live in a cave. Well, not really, but my house has very little natural light except in one room, so that’s the room where photos happen.

Flash

Why natural light? Your camera has a built-in flash, why not use it? Two words: red eye. (Though with most cats, it isn’t red at all!) With their ability to see better in the dark than you or I, a cat’s pupils can open up and accept a lot more light. They also reflect back a lot more light than yours or mine when the flash hits them. If you must use a flash, having it turned away from your subject so that it flashes at the ceiling or wall will let it spread out and not turn your kitty eyes into something that would do the basement cat proud.

Another reason I prefer not to use a flash is that most flashes have a “pre-flash” that the camera uses to read the available light and figure out how to expose the image. Sometimes the pre-flash is so close to the flash itself that you wouldn’t notice it, but cats often do. They close their eyes in reaction to the pre-flash and all you get are photos of cats with closed eyes.

This is Pierre’s pre-flash face:

Other lighting options

You can also get stationary lights to help illuminate things for photography. I have an inexpensive set, which helps for objects that are close to the lamps. They aren’t really a substitute for natural light. For one thing, Ashton is afraid of them, even if I set them up ahead of time.

Even worse, since they have to be fairly close to the subject to spread much light onto it, I have to move them closer and closer to the cats, who eventually decide that Ashton was right, the lights are scary. They might be a better solution for you, so it’s good to know the option is out there.

Put the light in the right place

Plenty of light won’t help you if it’s in the wrong place. You want the light behind you, not behind the cat. If you take a photo with the cat sitting between you and the light source, you’re going to be a silhouette, not a detailed image of your cat.

This poses a problem for those of us with indoor cats because their favorite places are usually windowsills, which by default cause this backlighting problem. You can solve it by moving to the side of the window and shooting photos parallel to the wall. This allows your camera to capture the light against your cat rather than just seeing the light that shines around your cat.

That gives you some ideas about things you can do to improve your cat photography with light. Join us Tuesday when our Topical Thursday is on a special day of the week due to the holidays for part two of this series.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means the cats get a small commission for their cat treat fund if you purchase after clicking the link on this page.

Waiting Her Turn

Laugh. Learn. Love Cats. #2016PetBloggerChallenge

1. How long have you been blogging?

And, for anyone who is visiting for the first time, please give a quick description of the subject of your blog.

2. What is the one thing that you accomplished during 2015, either on your blog or because of it, that made you most proud?

3. Which of your blog posts was your favorite this year and why?

4. What is one thing you’ve done in the past year that has brought more traffic to your blog?

5. Which of your blog posts got the most traffic this year? Why do you think it was so popular?

6. What is one blog that you read religiously – other than your own – and what makes you such a devoted reader?

7. What resources do you rely on to enhance your technical, writing, photography, social media, or other skills that improve your blog?

8. What is the best piece of advice you can offer other bloggers?

9. What is your vision for your blog in 2016? Do you have specific goals?

10. You have the attention of the pet blogging community – is there one blogging challenge you’d like help with, or one aspect of your blog that you’d like input on?

Cat Photography Tips, Part 2

Have your camera handy

Make magic moments happen

Get down on their level

Clear up the background

Take a lot of photos

Cat Photography Tips: Lighting

Have enough light for your camera

Flash

Other lighting options

Put the light in the right place

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