Kittens make stupid currency but are great for snapshots

Photographing cats is usually very rewarding because cats are unable to look bad. Really, what feline isn’t amazingly photogenic? So the chances of taking awful pictures are low and confined to technical issues. Cats can be tricky, of course: they move fast, they’re unpredictable, they have special personalities. Our happy mom, for instance, hates to be photographed. She always moves or hides her face as soon as she sees me with the camera, I’m not kidding. The kittens, and I almost wrote “the kids”, are another story, they’re playful and curious about everything, plus completely adorkable, something adult cats can never be (they’re still adorable, though). The coloring of this litter, all that black and white, makes it a bit difficult to expose correctly but that’s what full manual controls are for, assuming one knows what one’s doing (which isn’t always my case).

I simply adore this one above, because it looks like they were posing and pulling faces to boot, at least the one on the left. He (or she: we’re still a bit uncertain about the genders) was, of course, yawning. But I like to think otherwise.

As I said, adorkable. One more:

Resetting the cuteness scale

So here’s shamelessly stealing a Buffy line once again, but it seems appropriate: not only this little guy resembles Miss Kitty Fantastico in appearance, but the cuteness of him and his brothers and sisters really is off the scale. This is what a kitty looks like at 3 days old:

No idea what to name them yet, but I’m leaning toward Echo, Sierra, Victor, November and Tango. Or possibly Topher. Here’s an unconventional (?) shot of the mom:

I have to say I think all this black in the pictures led to some interesting results, even though shooting such dark subjects was a bit of a pain.

So, this thing can embed videos?

Just for the heck of it, since I'd never done it before (and probably will never do it again), here's 30 seconds (or possibly 45) of the new kittens, born just last Friday. Shot with a photocam, not a videocam, and then converted to a more reasonable size with a nifty little app I used to make vidz for the iPod.