How to make yawning cat pictures (+ some photos of Frederic)

aldona (57)in #photography • 7 years ago (edited)

Sometimes you see your cat waking up from a long nap, yawning and licking itself and it looks soo cute- but while taking your camera it wants already to play or just run away. It's especially hard with young cats that are full of energy. Well, I have some tips for you to make cute photos without waiting all day with turned on camera in hand.

1. Quick autofocus
You have only a few seconds to take a photo and you don't want to waste it for focusing camera at your cat's face. If it's not moving much, you can preset manual focus and wait in constant distance from the cat. Way easier is with autofocus, so you can use it exactly when the cat is starting to yawn. 'Take many pictures' option is also very useful.

2. Know the time or use natural bahaviors
Obviously, you don't want to wait for a long time for your cat to wake up from nap. But knowing it's time shedule would help a lot. You can also try to wake up the cat by giving a small snack (it will wake up and won't be mad at you, also this waking up is 'just enough', because cat won't be too playful or just turn it's back to you and continue sleeping)- you may end up with yawning pictures or cute ones where cat is licking itself. If you want to take more of those, put some cream or olive oil aroung your cat's mouth, not much, but enough for them to smell it. It'll start to lick and you will have more time to make photos.

3. Anatomy tricks
If your cat is sitting calmly, but it's not enough sleepy or just had a long nap and doesn't want to yawn any more naturally, you can try to induct yawning. Gently scratch your cat below whiskers and right behind them, also around corners of it's mouth. Be patient, but I'm pretty sure it will work after a few seconds, so have your camera turned on!

So have fun and I hope my artice was useful! :)

And here you have some other photos of my cat, he is actually quite easy to stay calm, so I have plenty of them and want to show them somewhere :)

My next post with #cat tag will be probably about tricks that you can teach your cat to do, maybe it will be a video, so follow me if you don't want to miss it!