Photographing cats indoors, where the light is bad and the cat is not cooperating

Use the window, not the flash and not the ceiling light

Every indoor room has one light source worth using and it is the window. A window is large relative to the cat, which makes the light soft, and it comes from the side, which gives the face and the coat some shape. Ceiling lights do the opposite: they are small, they are directly overhead, and they carve unflattering shadows into the eye sockets while leaving the underside of the face dark.

Position the cat, or more realistically wait for the cat, at roughly a right angle to the window, a metre or two away. Close to the glass the light is bright and contrasty; further back it falls off quickly and you run out of shutter speed. Avoid direct sunbeams for portraits, tempting as it is when the cat has parked in one, because the contrast between the sunlit and shaded halves of the face is more than a sensor can hold.

Flash is worth avoiding for two reasons beyond the flat, harsh result. It startles a lot of cats, and once startled the session is over. It also produces the reflective eye glare that comes from a cat's tapetum, the layer behind the retina that makes their eyes shine at night, which is very hard to remove convincingly afterwards.

Get down to floor level and stay there

The single biggest improvement in cat photography costs nothing: lie down. Photographs taken from standing height look like surveillance, they compress the cat into a foreshortened lump, and they put the floor in the background, which is almost always the ugliest surface in the room. At the cat's eye level you get the face front-on, the background becomes the far wall or the room beyond, and the cat reads as a subject rather than an object on the carpet.

Going low also changes what a phone lens does to the face. A wide phone camera held close and above exaggerates whatever is nearest to it, which is the nose, producing the bulbous-snout look. At eye level and a slightly greater distance the proportions stay normal.

There is a behavioural benefit as well. Looming over a cat is a threat posture. Sitting or lying on the floor makes you furniture, and a surprising number of cats will approach a person lying still with a phone in their hand when they would have left the room if that person had walked toward them.

Work with the cat's routine instead of posing it

Cats have fixed habits, and the shot exists inside those habits rather than outside them. There is a windowsill it sits on in the morning, a chair it sleeps in after eating, a spot on the stairs it stops at. If you know the routine, you can be in the right place with the light already sorted, and the cat arrives on its own schedule looking relaxed, which is the expression you actually want.

For a cattery or a sitting client, that means asking the owner where the cat settles and going there rather than picking the prettiest corner. For a rescue, it means giving a new arrival a day or two before photographing it, because a cat that has been in the building for six hours is not going to look like anything except a frightened cat in a box.

The post-meal window is reliably the best half hour of the day. Fed cats groom, stretch, blink slowly and sit still, all of which photographs well. The same cat before feeding is either asleep or moving too fast to focus on.

Getting focus and shutter speed indoors

Focus on the eye nearest the camera and accept nothing else. A cat photograph with sharp ears and soft eyes is a failed photograph, and at close range with a wide aperture the depth of field is genuinely too shallow to cover both. On a phone, tap directly on the eye rather than the head. On a camera with animal eye detection, use it, and check afterwards that it locked onto the eye rather than the nose.

Shutter speed is the constraint that low light imposes. A still, relaxed cat is fine at fairly slow speeds, but a head turn is fast, and the moment you want, ears forward and eyes wide as it looks toward a noise, is over in a fraction of a second. If your camera lets you set a minimum shutter speed, keeping it high enough to freeze a head turn and letting the ISO rise to compensate is the right trade. Noise you can live with, motion blur on the eyes you cannot.

Burst is essential rather than optional. Slow blinks, ear flicks and tail movement mean the frame with the right expression is a matter of luck, and the only way to buy luck is volume. Shoot ten, keep one, delete the rest before they clog your phone.

The clutter problem

Domestic interiors are full of things that make a photograph look unprofessional, and cats sit next to all of them. A radiator, a plug socket, a bin, a pile of post, a litter tray in the corner of the frame. For a business posting these publicly, the clutter is what separates a photograph that looks like a service from one that looks like a snapshot in someone's kitchen.

The cheapest fix is angle. Moving thirty centimetres to one side, or dropping lower so the background becomes a plain wall rather than a worktop, removes most of it at capture. The second cheapest is a wide aperture or portrait mode to soften the background, though portrait mode struggles with whiskers and fur edges and often clips them, so check the result at full size before you rely on it.

When the clutter cannot be avoided, and in a client's home it frequently cannot, editing is the remaining option. Foxi AI handles this reasonably: you upload the photo and describe what you want changed, or apply a look, and it cleans up the background and lighting while keeping the cat and the room's actual layout intact. Most edits come back in under a minute. It is worth being disciplined about scope, though. Tidying a background in a client's home is presentation. Editing the animal, or making a cattery pen look larger or cleaner than it is, crosses into misrepresenting something a person is making a decision about.

Photographing a cat that does not want to be photographed

Some cats will not have it, and the correct response is to stop. A cat with flattened ears, a low tail, dilated pupils and a fixed stare is not going to produce a usable photograph and is telling you clearly that it wants the interaction to end. Pushing gets you a worse image and a cat that associates you and your phone with being cornered.

For the merely uninterested rather than the distressed, novelty works better than food. Cats habituate to sounds quickly, so a squeaker or a rustling bag buys you two or three seconds of ears-forward attention once, and then it is spent. Have a second and third sound in reserve, and use them at the moment you are already framed and focused rather than to get the cat's attention in the first place.

The other reliable technique is patience with a fixed frame. Set up on the spot you know the cat uses, get the exposure and focus roughly right, and wait with the camera already in position. Photographs of relaxed cats are almost always made by people who stopped chasing and let the cat come back.

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