cat photography #1 a start

One of our long deferred plans .. let´s write some words about cat photography. In our daily twitter “life” we often get asked about this topic, about experience and some ideas, tricks, tips, some technical details, equipment and more .. (there a hundreds of details to write about). Your first thoughts should always be your cat models, they are often not easy to shoot, they have different moods, they like to move unexpected, so it can become tricky. Sometimes an occasional snapshot is ok . Some ideas here:

Your cat should be fine, healthy, relaxed or playful for a shot or photo session (and u should be relaxed too). We learned NOT to photograph shy, anxious cats or cats, who are ill (with very few exceptions).

Actually your start then is quite simple:

#1 get a camera, find (better have) a cat,  then #JustDoIt 😻🐾

Xmas Hugo 2015

Maybe we should start with some absolutely basics, remarks and what we call “rules of thumbs”. Rules of thumbs means, you can apply the rule 90-99,9% of the time you try to get a good pic, after several 100s or 1000s shots you can try to start breaking the rules:

Bunny paw Hugo

#2 u need a camera device ( from smartphone, tablets .. up to high end DSLR equip). For the start

let´s talk about smartphones, the most common device, more below)

#3 light is your friend

#4 forget flash

#5 try to get focus right

#6 best camera? the one u have with you ready at your fingertips/paws

Shelter cat end of 2016
#foreverhome now

About 3 years ago, Hugodad started his regular shelter visits and shooting lots of cats photos ( of Lady Minky, me and a to of other cats in the shelter, actually the number is several x ten thousands, so we think we write about some experiences from it (Equipment used see below).

#1 just start taking pictures of your cat(s), u will get better and more experienced with time (and you will hopefully learn, where and why u “failed” or are not happy with the results). We wanted to start with #2 (see above) smartphones and will talk about pro/contras and some limits of what you can do and expect.

Nisha shelter cat
still waiting for a
foreverhome

“#3 light is your friend”

Smartphones became quite good as cameras during the last years and many people use them as (the only) camera today. Many smartphones ( and even larger cameras) often have problems with getting a good shot in low light conditions, pictures often can get “noisy” / bad photo quality and often getting a good sharp focus can also be tricky. Best solution (if possible) is try to get more light for your cat models (without switching on flash on your camera smartphone) see #4 .

 #4 forget flash

Using Flash to get more light with a flash can be a possible (last IMHO) solution to get a photo, but very often photos are not satisfying (flat look, zombie eyes etc ..). Some cats are also afraid or shocked if u use a flash, so we do not like using flash for cat photography. RTFM or online help, how to switch off flash.

#5 try to get focus right/sharp

We often see blurred (out of focus) pictures, because the smartphone “decided” to do an out of focus shot. Please do not confuse this with a blurred picture from your cat moving too fast, this is/can be a different problem. setting the focus on the iPhone here is just a finger tap to set the focus point. For cat photography there is one simple rule: try to get the focus on the cats eye(s) (for longer distances the nose will work too). RTFM or online help, how to set the focus (if possible) on your smartphone.

black shelter cat
needs forever home too

#6 don´t ask about “the best camera”!

the one u have with you ready at your fingertips/paws is best, an expensive DSLR at home won´t help you, if you want to get a shot right now (one of the greatest smartphone advantages). Another consideration: practically no one has unlimited financial resources to always buy a good or best/newest camera  (and you will need learning time for a new device too) , get, what can afford and then stop thinking about new equip for 1-2 years and (learn to) use, what u got.

Hugi sunlight

That´s it for today, feel free to ask me questions on twitter or in the comment section.

Topics for next photo blogpost: pro/cons and limits of smartphones and some ideas about minor image editing and publishing cat pics on the net)

Yours Hugi and his photographer Hugidad

P.S.: since i will be asked anyway, here a short list of equipment used during the last years:

smartphones: old Samsung S2(drowned, rest in peace) , i(Cat)Phone 5s, iPhone 6plus

tablets: iPads several generations

good old Panasonic Lumix

DSLR Nikon D7000 first, then D7100 was added, several lenses and additional equip for both

All Photos in this blogpost shot with an Iphone, they may not be purrfect, i just needed some examples, what can be done with a smartphone without major image editing.

Some Hugi Meows and tools..

we are playing with.

Moin friends, we spend a some more quiet relaxing christmas days here and got a lot of mail and gifts. Staff visited the large family of Hugimum for some festivities and noms .. i will have to put staff on after xmas diet now 😉 . Me and Lady Minky are fine, we have ridiculous spring christmas weather here, we had sun and about 13-15 deg C here at xmas.. crazy climate for germany.

christmas Hugo 2015

christmas Lady Minky 2015

Hugodad managed to do his regular shelter (my former home 2,5 years ago) visits quite often and happily a lot of kitties found a forever home this year (we don´t have the complete numbers yet). (twitter clue: we decided to tag all our shelter tweets with hash #owlcats, so we can find them later, OWL is the german region where we live and our city is the largest in this area here). Here some of the best moments, when these cats found their #foreverhome:

Löwi aka Löwenherz

Martin

Paulina

Smitty aka Schmidtchen

Hugo Twitter year 2015

It was a real interesting year for me, Lady Minky and our staff – we really learned a lot. We met a lot of really nice animals and their humans, we learned a lot about animal communities on twitter, we started little bit of blogging again, but there are/were also a lot of downs during the year. A large # of animal friends we know went over he bridge (too many to mention), some accounts of pals we know went inactive or simply disappeared and even some friendships went broke.

In other news: the #weetigang got their own blog/website, we started it, it still needs a lot of work but we have a start, some help/assistance/ideas with would be appreciated .. feel welcome.

On the technical side of Twitter, there were also some news (some ok, some bad or just stupid):

1. Most annoying for me: notifications on the Twitter networks seem to be notoriously unstable/unreliable/notifications get lost (mobile devices worst), we get and see a lot of complaints about this topic.
2. Twitter made the very stupid decision to replace the non-broken fav-star(!) with stupid FB-like hearts (do u really love to put the hearts on sad news tweets and links ?)
3. Twitter gave us twitter direct message groups(!), a good idea with some pro and contras)

In the last blogpost i mentioned some (software) tools, we play around to publish tweets, photos, stories and more (that´s one reason, why we don´t have too much time for blogging here).

Here is a short list:

Storify, a very good tool to documents events or collect some tweets, which would be gone forever, if we could not “record” and collect them. Some friends started to use it too, we will write about it more in the future. If u want to see, what can be done, here the link to my Hugo storify site,  just for fun i will do a short #unfug collection storify in some minutes. If you want to see more Stories:

here my Hugo Storify site

Medium, another tool to create an article or blogpost (really very easy to use, Hugodad gave it some tries and now i plan to use it for several topics(ideas: learning from “masters of cat photography”, split in two categories: photo professionals Hugodad found during the years and then good cat photographers, who tweet pics regularly .. maybe add some background story. 2nd idea: introduce some of our animal communities for new twitter friends, sometimes it is not easy to find/get some information and links). My First medium post:

Cat empire: Aoshima, cat island Japan

The last tool, i want to mention today, is a communication tool, we started to use some months ago.

Tool is called Slack, short description is: mix the best of email and twitter DM groups, add search and archive functions and you get the/an idea of it. For me it is just the best way i know ( til further notice, to keep lots of links/ tweets and information organised and distribute them. if want to get an impression here is a Slack is link (be less busy nails it..) , i use it on a invite only base. Cu in Slackland (won´t be the last time, i write about it 😉

Yours Hugi

christmas nap Hugi

#foreverhome day anniversary 2015

Moin, it has been some time since the last blogpost here. We (me and Hugidad) were quite busy and a lot of things happened. Two years ago i spent my last day in shelter, i was adopted then on 7th December 2013, a very important date in my life.

i did a storify about it:

Hugo and Minky gotcha day 2015

 

Hugo in shelter

Since then a lot happened.

What else happened in the Last Months? about 3 months ago our Lady Minky here became very ill for about 10 days, Staff was very worried. She did’t eat, drink, pee and poo (and quickly lost a lot of weight) , so she got the whole vet program, xrays, blood test and more.. she got a serious urinary tract infection. After some infusions and antibiotics treatment she recovered quick, so staff and me were really happy. Now she has reached her normal winter weight again and she does her outdoor pawtrols, as if nothing ever happened.

Minky on pawtrol

11 years ago Minky was adopted by HugoDad, here is her first photo in her #foreverhome.

First Minky pic ever
17th Dec 2004

About this blog .. we neglected it, since we spend more time on twitter and use a lot of other tools (storify .. i will have to test how-to embed them here, Slack and Medium site) to publish interesting stories and links, but we would like to use it as a our “central link archive” collection site.

btw .. there are rumours about a #weetie website.

May have our friends have a mice happy crispmouse Xmas fest

yours Hugi !

Some Links from the last months in the next blogpost.

#our animal shelter – #owlcats

About our animal shelter Bielefeld in here in Bielefeld, Germany

 First i thing to do, i fink,  is to clarify the term “OWL”.

The region of Germany, where i live is called

OstWestfalen-Lippe .. it is the eastern part of the state of NorthRhine-Westfalia .. and LOL germans decided to call it East-West-(lol)-Falia or #OWL for short.

(if  you really want to waste some time ..

read the Bielefeld conspiracy 😉

Animal shelter Bielefeld

Long ago i wrote some words about our animal shelter here. It was the time when i found my #foreverhome. On twitter i very often get questions or comments about our shelter. As a lot of you know, my Hugodad works as a volunteer at the shelter, he tries to visit it every week (if time permits), very often he visits shelter on friday afternoons.

He plays with some of the cats ( some become his special friends/darlings), they cuddle with him and he tries to get nice photos (i call it #photies 😉 .

FYI photie is a wordgame with the german word “Pfote” aka “paw”

(as in “pawsum Hugi;) .

Some of these photos are used by the animal shelter organisation for their website and for local newspapers to help get cats adopted.

shelter cathouse back

Very often i hear on Twitter, that we have a nice shelter .. and i have to say YES.

On the ground floor we have a friendly reception room with our “welcome guard” cats and the shelter team . the “guard welcome cats” are residents of the shelter. Then some large storage rooms for cat food, litter etc.

Next 9 friendly bright rooms for about 4-8 cats living together, each with an outdoor caged area. Finally 2 real large rooms for another 6-8 cats plus 12 additional single cat boxes in each room. single boxes are for cats,  who need a special diet or do not socialise well with other cats. these to rooms have an outdoor area too for all cats, even for the single boxes.

The complete first floor is a quarantine and near-complete vet station.

New cats gets arrive here and stay here for 4 weeks. they get a complete check-up, vaccinations and vet treatment if necessary (I spent my 4 weeks there too).

A vet for and at the shelter (is securing medical support for all animals) works in the vet station (and he has another room in the main building).

outside

inside a room

So i have to say, it could be called a “luxury” shelter, cats do not have found their foreverhomes, but they do not have a bad/sad life here.

Opening hours for visitors , people interested in adopting a cat and volunteers are monday til saturday 15:00/3 pm til 18:00/6 pm .

This new(!) nice cat shelter house was planned and build in the years 2007-2009 (opening).

It was made possible by the legacy of an old catfriend lady. The shelter organisation got a real large sum of money(> 500000€) , which should be and was used for a new cathouse.

For some month (June 2013 til 07th Dec. 2013)  it was my HugiHome. As all shelters I knowof , we need always more funds, but at least we have a very nice cathouse.

Mecki, the Guardian #1

Simba, the guardian #2

my friend Löwi
he was adopted some weeks ago

Now holidays in our state have begun (NRW Nortrhine-Westfalia) , which means, it is the time of the year, when the shelter will have a lot of new cats are arriving.

Some are young cats born in May and some real stupid people just dump their cats before they start their holiday trip.

To support my former now I started a campaign #owlcats (Cats in OWL aka Ostwestfalen-Lippe .. name of our region in Germany here, see above).

Here is the Start of #owlcats on Twitta,

I made a Storify (german. it is for our german audience) about #owlcats campaign

Your Hugi

(#pawwave to shelterteam and some volunteer friends)

P.S.: maybe i will have to make some minor edit/updates)

(pictures in dis blogpost – as always .. – are copyrighted by my Hugidad)

#HugiMeows #1 … #RIPNeo

(update.. added some pics from Neo friends, scroll to end)

no..

no..

NO, i did really not want to insert our loved Neo hamster buddy into a blogpost title!

Neo

Neo

This should have been the first regular blogpost called #HugiMeows .

It should appear weekly or bi-weekly, with some short stories about Lady Minky and me, news from Hugodads weekly animal shelter visits and maybe some events from our animal community. Dat was the plan ..

But yesterday in the evening (german time) i read the sad news,

that my hamster friend Neo went OTRB :-((( .

Hugo

all our Moin group friends also cried ..

Hatschebutz

Nella

Leo

Mick

MyFourCats

(Wise Mr. Kuma, i would like to add a picture of you too, can you select one for our Neo darling?)

 

Kuma the Great

The Cinnamons also sent us a photo for Neo

HugiDad and me are very sad! He always made us smile with his lovely face and his cute nose.

May the little cutie rest in peace .. #RIPNeo friend !

Datz it for today

your sad Hugi 😦

———————————————

i searched some pics of how we want to remember our weetie friend Neo:

 

__________________________

no copyright text today, but plz respect our friend Neo and his friends !

Goodbye Ma .. come back soon!

 

It was a real bad Hugiday 😦

After my early morning garden patrol I switched on my iCatPhone and then i saw it ..

a Bye-bye from TribeOfMa tweet made my eyes leaky
my loved Ma will be going offline and I don’t know how long!

(pic from @tribeOfMa)

For me it is a real sad situation. I fell in love wif Ma!

Ma’s Dad @TribeOfMa beame a real good Hugidad friend during the last year.

He is in real reallife trouble now, and we can only hope the best for him and his tribe of beautiful cats!This goodbye tweet triggered a large reaction .. out catworld is loosing a good friend, animal lover and puurfect cat photographer .. at least for a while. All my friends hope TribeOfMa comes back soon!

The situation of a twitta account going offline  or inactive is nothing new. Other friends took a twitta break (i understand that), Cookie or EvilStevie were inactive for several months and we were worried if they would come back. Even more worrying is the situation,when a twiita account simply disappears and noone knows what has happened .. one of our palz (Mimipuss)  “disappeared” without any notice .

For me this is a very diifficult situation to handle, but i found some ways to handle it. How to prepare for such events will be topic of another blogpost (my codename is #bestTwittaPractice).

Hint: “that is my tip for our friends, if u find a good twitta friend, get his email adress, just in case ..”

Another sad day today was Bonnies blog:

Humum has a lot of real trouble and deserves a loz of #zombiesquad and #pawcircle hugs and purrz!

Bye for today

sad Hugi

Hugs to TribeOfMa( come back soon plz!) and

Bonnie (care for Mum)

 

Our beloved cats on Twitter

In the past few months, more than one friend of mine (and yours) saw his or her kitty photo appear here and there from other accounts. This is very upsetting because we love our cats and nobody likes to see his or her pics posted by other accounts as if it were his or her own. Deeply hurtful. How can we define such a thing? How can we define this behaviour? There is an uncomfortable (rude, but correct) word for this:

STOLEN==**Phototheft**

Do we like this behaviour? Of course not!

(disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but i read a lot about the topic and talked
with several lawyers about our topic here. Links at the end of blogpost)

Sometimes, Phototheft happens because a Twitter user (a new one, he/she maybe there for first time on Twitter) doesn’t know (or hasn’t read even) Twitter and copyright rules (I must admit, rules are sometimes very long to be read and complicated, etc. …).

Regardless, rules **ARE** important and **ARE** valid for everybody.

New Twitter users (we’ll call them TweetyCats) are often insecure as to how to manage tweets, RTs and FAVs. For a good and accurate start, I wish to propose the following. It’s meant as helpful!

**First:**

If you love a photo, simply use the RT (Retweet) button to share it with your friends.

Every friend who follows you will be happy to see your photo ReTweeted.

Twitter is about sharing and that is the easiest way.
Using the RT button, you do nothing wrong.

**Second:**

You can also use Fav (Favourite) button to indicate that you like a photo,

but that doesn’t help sharing the tweet among your friends.

**Third:**

**DO NOT USE** photo/photos from other Tweetycat/Tweetycats and send it as your own!

Some people download pics they like and then send them again as their own pics.

This is an extremely rude behaviour (and may have Twitter and legal consequences).
Every photo you did not take/shoot by yourself has a copyright owner (you accepted the rules,
when you created your Twitter account, this must not be forgotten, never!).
Your account can be banned or permanently suspended.

If someone has money, time and a lawyer, you can also be sued for copyright infringement.
You can easily understand that this is less than a good thing.

You can eventually use a “not your” photo, but you need written permission from the photo owner,
which allows you to use the photo you like.

There are some license types you should know:

Public Domain: Photo can be used free
Creative Common license : you can use, BUT are required to credit the photographer.

Erasing or cropping (c) signs is very bad and extremely unfair, and is an criminal act in most countries we are aware of.
Similarly, if you add your own watermark to copyrighted photos without permission, it’s theft.

**Fourth:**

If you take your own photos of your cats, it is good advice to place a watermark with copyright sign on them before posting them on Twitter.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop #Photothief s from copying your #photos but they can be identified more easily.

Depending on the platform (smartphone, tablet, PC/Mac) you are using,
there are several options to watermark your photos:

For iPhone/iPad it can be used an app called MarkSta.
To create a simple (c) watermark takes a few seconds. Add them to your photos before you publish/tweet them.
You can also save copyright watermark as templates for future use.

For Android:

PC has several options:
a free program you can use for watermark would be Irfanview
it has a lot of photo editing features, for waterk mark usage google
“irfanview watermark” to find links, I even found some youtube links explaining it.

PC and Mac I use Adobe Lightroom 5 (really love this software !).
You can create easy templates for watermarking when you are going to shoot photos for twitter/web use.

Ressources/Links :
Twitter Copyright and DMCA policy
https://support.twitter.com/entries/15795

Twitter Fair use
https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171959-fair-use

Can I Use that Picture? The Terms, Laws, and Ethics for Using Copyrighted Images
http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com/2014/07/14/can-i-use-that-picture/

nice decision flowchart ..
for beginners: check upper left edge first!

Hugo Storify:
“the RT button is your friend”
best practice .. work in progress, will come soon.

Since a blogpost is never finished complete, i will hit publish button now,
but maybe i will add some minor updates and links later.
Your HugoDad

ps:
if u kept reading til here, finally a cat #photie:
my loved Houston cat shot at our animal shelter here..
He found a #foreverhome long ago!

my friend Houston by teraeuro on 500px

version: 1.0

Hugodad and @Hugo4de update

Long time no write, but I was quite busy,
We are back from our Southern Africa Holiday trip ( Cape Town, western part of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Victoria Falls, then south Africa (SA) south coast (garden route) ending in Capetown, about 6500 kilometers on the road plus some flights in 4 weeks.
During the last week of our trip i met my twitter friend

@hartcap <- special #FF here

(father of evil TOM on twitter, follow
-> @tomscrazyworld plz)

and spend a nice evening with him and his wife, hi Tian!
He lives in Hartenbos, southern coast of SA, paradise on earth, happy man.

Hartenbos / Mosselbay sunrise

For more info on our Holiday trip see my travel and photography blog
Niconcat , here only 3 of my personal highligthts
Capetown back to Germany again :-(( .

Dune of Death .. by teraeuro on 500px

Cheetah .. rough love by teraeuro on 500px

Hugo and Minky are both fine, our good cat sitters cared very well for them.
Hugo gained a pound weight. One of cat sitters told us, Hugo also wants to go outside,
so we decided to let Hugo out in the garden after 5 months with us.
our first try in Winter, Hugo is not amused (harnass?)


It seems Hugo is no outdoor cat. He was found on the street, so our animal shelter
had no further information about him. He likes our garden, he is running around smelling
the grass and the flowers, buy my feeling is, he is no great mouser .. .

April 24.4 Hugo first time outdoor without harness, now a happy Hugo cat

Twitter pause and @Hugo4de update

Some friends already know it: time for my holidays this year.
I will visit southern Africa for the next 4 weeks (i want #Photies of Hugos big brothers ..).
So i will not tweet very much for the first 3 weeks, as i don’t know, where on our trip i will have a good INet connection. The last week will be South Afrika, for SA i already got a SIM-Card with data option and i selected hotels with free Wifi. Hopefully i will meet @hartcap, Father/Inventor of TOM, during this week, so be prepared/warned 😉
You can find more info about our trip in a second blog, i created for this tour:

–> #NiConCat

(will be used later for more photos #nocatcontent ).

my Nikoncat Hugo

Hugo and Minky (#mycat) are in good hands, a friend of us and our nice nice neighbors will care for them, they already cared for Minky during the last holiday trips.

Hugo is fine here, Minky and he accept each other. Hugo is still an indoor cat, the team at the animal shelter didn’t know, if he is an outdoor cat, because he was found on the street and brought to the shelter.
I made some Outdorr trips with him, but after 10-15 minutes he wants to go inside again ( see photos below ).
He is such a nice boy, we love him !
His latest idea: lying beside me in the evening watching football and purring like a Diesel…

Twitter @Hugo4de:
Hugo will continue to collect #highquality #catcontent, he will RT these tweets and
his #catcontent and BestOf collections/links will be posted.
You can also contact @masterkillercat ( or @msgbi ), if @hugo4de tweet errors occur / broken links ..

byebye .. see you in 4 weeks again!

HugoDad @teraeuro

some Hugo Photos

Hugo testing Snow ..

nice better weather ..

spring is here ..

kissing Minky

Minky is not impressed ..

CU in 4 Weeks!