Image CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 Steve Rotman on Flickr.com
I’m joining Trina Haase at Trinarrative for a daily haiku challenge in December.
When you have nine cats and an iPhone, you take a lot of cat photos. I know some people are really organized and sort their photos into albums. I don’t, which drives my iPhone crazy, so it sorts them for me. Recently it collected all my cat photos into one album–of over 5,000 photos. Five thousand photos of cats. I knew I had a lot, but five thousand? I definitely haven’t taken five thousand photos of people with my phone.
But cats are good subjects for photography. They sit still a lot and they gravitate toward really good light and they mostly look pretty. You don’t have to do much to get a good photo (Chipotle napping on the curtains because the cat bed apparently wasn’t enough):
They tend to be very photogenic, even when they look a little cranky. Here’s my mom’s formerly feral cat, Barbara, who’s mama to my four formerly feral kittens and only looks angry in this photo because the petting stopped long enough to snap her picture:
Even when you don’t get a good-quality photo, you can still capture some of the goofier things they do (the four kitten siblings plus Zorro swarming an open suitcase):
And sometimes a slightly out-of-focus photo actually captures the moment best (Panda with his favorite toy):
They curl up in sweet positions (Oliver and Chipotle, mortal enemies except sometimes when they’re cold):
Oliver would certainly be in the running for least dignified and graceful cat ever, but even he often takes deceptively dignified photos:
But not all cats were meant for the camera. I try so hard to get a good photo of Chipotle, my favorite cat, and it’s almost impossible. He has a good side:
But photos of his left side don’t capture the special charm of his appearance. Chipotle was born a little uneven: his right side is smaller than his left. Smaller ear, smaller eye, smaller nostril, smaller teeth. Everything is smaller on the right side except his whiskers: he got an extra dose of those running up his nose. Or maybe it’s his eyebrows displaced down his nose because he doesn’t really have eyebrows on that right side. Nothing works quite right on that side, so he sneezes a lot and sounds a little asthmatic as he breathes and that wonky eye constantly tears up. I think he’s super adorable. Unfortunately, photos from the uneven side usually make him look homelier than he really is:
A photo that captures his full adorability is rare, but I think this one comes close:
uneven eye weeps
mouth twists in a grimace
little face I love
the dirigible plum 
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