Sansa the circus cat

These pictures I am posting of Sansa should not be confused with just more pictures of cats on the Web. Let’s face it—no serious blogger posts cat pictures. What these are, obviously, are serious photography related postings.

Okay. Now that I have made that clear . . .

Following is a picture of Sansa (my son’s fiancés kitten) in full flight chasing a sheath of barley seed that the fiancé is waving about.

Her amazing leap was launched from those dig claw marks about a third of the way up and a third of the way in from the right hand side. She is heading across the picture towards the wall and at this point is basically directly above that dense patch of weeds beneath her. She is about a metre off the ground.

If the doesn’t look impressive then consider the following picture, which is a crop taken from the picture above.

That is her launch point in the bottom right. You can also see the small sheath of seeds just above her head; which is what she is trying to snare. She has obviously missed them but you can forgive her for that as the fiancé is waving them about making them a very difficult catch.

Finally here is a further crop taken from the original picture. Don’t you love modern DSLR cameras? Do this with your camera phone …

Look at her front paws. Claws fully exposed. Fingers spread wide for maximum coverage in the air to hook ‘something’. Body at full length. Oh, and on the photography front, even at this crop level and at the speed she would be moving through the air, you can still make out the furry hair on her chest and her whiskers.

Camera: Pentax K-3
Lens: Pentax 18-135 f3.5-5.6 ED AL[IF] DC (I almost never take this lens off these days)
Lighting: The sun, about 15 percent overcast
Winder: High-speed multi frame
F-stop: f8
Shutter: 1/1600
Exposure reading: 80% centre weighted, locked from the fallen tree branch
Negative format: JPG, highest quality setting (RAW too slow for high-speed multi frame)
Focal length: 28mm