Cat on steps

My flickr contact James Wu posted this high contrast image of a cat on steps taken with his Ricoh GXR. Brilliant use of high contrast.

Christopher Guest Channels Best in Show for Brilliantly Bizarre PetSmart Ads

Christopher Guest Channels Best in Show for Brilliantly Bizarre PetSmart Ads

Oh my god, these are incredible. If you don’t know the work of Christopher Guest then you’ll still appreciate the idea of “pet-obsessed nutjobs” but Guest’s improvisational, “documentary” style is a perfect fit for these ads.

If you were a fan of Christopher Guest’s classic movie Best in Show, PetSmart has the perfect campaign for you.

The brand, with agency GDS&M, hired the writer, actor and filmmaker to direct a set of commercials in his signature mockumentary style, under the tagline “Partners in Pethood.” The results are, unsurprisingly, great.

Best in Show remains one of Guest’s best movies of all time, hilarious and if you get the DVD, don’t forget to watch the extras and outtakes, they’re as good or better than the movie.

Player and spectators

My flickr contact Marser caught this excellent cat action shot with his Ricoh GR in Kyoto.

Marser posts a lot of great cat pictures that I don’t post here (the internet is busting with cat pictures) but this image, while an excellent image in its own right is also a great example of the ability of a point and shoot camera to stop action. He shot it at 1/1000 of a second at f/2.8 with the ISO set to 40. The fast shutter speed froze the leaping cat, the wide aperture kept the shutter speed high and narrowed the depth of focus (cats, not fence) and the low ISO kept the white cat from blowing out. This is a great example of someone who really knows what they’re doing and while this could be done with almost any camera, the Ricoh GR’s speed of operation makes shots like this easier (I surmise, I really don’t know, I’ve never tried a shot like this).

Toothless cat

My flickr contact Tatsuo Suzuki took this great image of a cat missing some teeth.

There’s something about this cat that makes it a great subject for a street photograph. This isn’t a typical cute cat portrait, more like a portrait of a street animal.

Cat bag

My flickr contact Accountant from Cleveland took this great image of someone on a bus or subway using his iPhone with a cat bag with his iPhone. Fantastic.

Yawn

My flickr contact Marser took this great shot of a group of cats in Kyoto, Japan with his Ricoh GR.

Ibiza in winter

Flickr member Lorenzo Giunchi shot this brilliant image of a cat in Ibiza, Balearic Islands, Spain with his Ricoh GR.

Cheetahs on the Edge

Cheetahs on the Edge–Director’s Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of an incredible crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before.

Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.

The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming.

This is an incredible piece of video and I highly recommend that you watch it full screen and all the way to the very end so you can see the making of piece and a real time chunk of video of how fast the animals were really running.

The cheetah’s heads are so steady it’s like they’ve got gyroscopes built into them. Having had a cat I can vouch for the fact that cats have special abilities in this area, no doubt to enable hunting on the run but cheetahs being the fastest cats on earth take it to a whole different level.

[via The Kid Should See This]

Dexter throws a mouse

Flickr photographer angeloangelo’ caught an amazing image of his cat tossing a mouse. What a capture. He has an excellent wild and domestic (animals) set too.

Missing Cat Poster

Missing Cat Poster

I can relate to this in variety of ways:

As one who lost a cat and made posters (they worked, we got her back)

As one who’s been asked to do things and couldn’t sync with the person asking

As one who’s asked for help and couldn’t sync with the person helping

As one who both understands the emotional state the owner of a lost pet and also understands how that might look to someone who thinks its over the top

This is a metaphor for so many things: map it onto almost any miscommunication and it works. Fantastic.