The Cat Jumping Over the Couch Project

These are from a while back, finally decided to post them. This project shows some of the challenges of action cat photography, a subset of the already challenging field of cat photography. I wanted to capture XingXing in one of his typical athletic endeavors. Of course, these usually involve throwing his rainbow catnip mice. He will jump over objects large and tall to pursue those mice, and usually he brings it back to my general vicinity in his mouth, like a dog playing catch - haven't captured that on camera yet. Or perhaps that would be better on video. Anyway, the object here was action stills. I set up multiple flashes (infrared triggered) and the camera on a tripod with remote trigger on the other side of the couch. Because I'm using infrared trigger and not wireless radio trigger, I need a line of sight to take the photo, so that resulted in me in the background gesticulating oddly with the remote trigger immediately after I threw the mouse. I set the focus to manual at the top of the couch. The most difficult aspect was the timing, as it all happened extraordinarily quick. I got 2 or 3 "decent' shots out of about 20 attempts! This is one of the funnier ones. Would be perfect if only a.) had captured the XingXing's front paws and b.) no goofy cat photographer in the background: And here, this image is terrible. The flash is concentrated on the cat hair rug in the middle of the couch.............

But wait! the power of a good crop. Here is the same photo, cropped down just to the cat. Now, after cropping so much can't blow this up to an 17 inch photo, but for a humble cat photography blog, it does just fine:

Finally, here is another of the keepers. Look at the intensity of a world class feline athlete!