This is Harry. He's Sarah's cat and hates it when she's away. Sarah is a friend who lives next door.

(This is another photo post because I’ve been feeling rough with a cold so the more serious posts aren’t quite ready.)

Summer happened (at last) over the weekend so we enjoyed sitting in the garden with drinks, good books, and the occasional cat on a lap till they got too hot.

Harry is pictured above. He’s Jenny’s favourite. Late Sunday afternoon with the sun low he wandered across to spiky plant, had a sniff, and then wandered back. The way the light shone off his fur as he came back was striking. How to get a photo of it.

Well, here’s the first tip. Go get a camera. Or if you’re a real photographer have it with you at all times. I fetched it. I also fetched a bowl of Harry’s favourite biscuits, placed it by spiky plant and called Harry:

See what I mean about the angle of the light? Now all I needed was him stoked up on biscuits ambling back across the lawn towards me. Second tip is to focus on where you want the moving object to be when you click. These cheap modern cameras insist on doing the focusing for you so point at your planned location and half press the button till the focus is set. Keep the button there. (It preserves the focus and speeds up taking the photo.)

Third tip: use the viewfinder rather than the LCD screen because that way you can track a moving object more accurately, especially in bright light. You will smudge one lens of your glasses but there you go.

I’m not going to grace the next tip with a number because it’s so obvious. If you haven’t set for a fast shutter speed….

Now point at the target animal and prepare to track them till they reach the place you’ve focused on. That way the moving object is sharper than the background.

Excuse me, I said to track the cat.

And cat, you’re supposed to amble gently back because you’ve got a full tummy, not hear something interesting and go for a world 5 m record.

Sorry Jenny. I’ll try again.

PS if the cat does notice what you’re doing why does it immediately want to touch its nose against the lens?

The first photo (apart from Header) is Harry in a different mood on another day with higher intermittent sun. It was pleasantly warm. He decided to keep me company by flopping down on the grass and every minute or two wriggling into a new position (he’s good at daft positions). I set the camera to macro with fast shutter (to force wide aperture and therefor blurred background), left the zoom at normal wide, and rolled around on the grass with him (which he loved). Whenever he stopped for a while the camera was already very close so he was used to it, and my finger was on the button. Took quite a few. Some were blurred – guess why.

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Cat attack (Shrek in boots)

I couldn’t resist this photo of a kitten primed for anything (notice the ears, eyes and paws). It’s by Nicolas Valentin from Glasgow, who kindly gave permission for me to reproduce the photo. He can be found via his Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/people/adrian_valentin_murphy/

Thank you Nicolas, great photo.

You may guess I’m a bit of a cat person. I seem to be particularly good with elderly cats. We’ve had two of our own, and now the neighbour’s 18 year old called Mischief (pronounced mischeef for those of you living outside the north of England) has adopted us. We send him home at about 8 each evening to spend time with his own family and have his thyroid tablets. You wrap a tablet in a small piece of sliced ham and he’s so greedy he gobbles it up without noticing the contents. (Mischief has hs own photo on the web site.)

I came across the photo on a great blog called Cute Overload.

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