Picture of a cat on the shoulders of a young man

This is the kind of cat picture that I like which is why I have published it here. Regrettably, I have forgotten the name of the man and I don't know the name of the cat. That's my fault for delaying in publishing it. But whenever I see a photograph where there is obviously a lot of love between a cat and a person, I warm to it and want to spread the word by republishing it provided I'm allowed to under copyright laws. 

But copyright laws have been trashed by the Internet, particularly websites such as Pinterest and Google Images. They publish billions of photographs all the time and they are all, strictly speaking, copyright protected but nobody does anything about it because copyright is over in respect of images on the Internet in my honest and considered opinion. That's boring. But the affection between cat and person is not. It is delightful and emotionally warming photo.

Picture of a cat and a young man. I don't know the name of the photographer. Sorry. It's a good cat pic though.

How do you take a good cat photograph? Well, firstly, you have to have a camera at the ready because these moments to capture photographically are fleeting (no problem with smartphones). They are called 'decisive moments' in the photographic genre. You have to have a good eye to spot them and be ready to capture them. And it goes without saying that you need some grasp of photography but this has become dramatically less important nowadays because smartphone cameras have become so sophisticated that even on automatic mode, they cope admirably with difficult lighting conditions. 

There is one issue which needs to be taken care of and that is the shutter speed. If you are taking photographs indoors, as is often the case with domestic cats, it is likely that the automatically set shutter speed will be quite slow at about 1/30 of a second which is too slow to capture fast-moving objects like domestic cats.

Therefore, you should be prepared to manually override the shutter speed and crank it up to about 1/200 at least and adjust the aperture accordingly. You may have to adjust the sensitivity of the sensor because indoor lighting is naturally much darker and therefore what photographers used to call the ASA speed needs to be increased to around 1500 to even 5000 which is possible in smart phones and modern digital cameras with only a marginal loss in image quality.