How to photograph a cat with your phone

A quick phone setup before the cat moves

1. Turn the flash off and use the light already available.
2. Frame from the cat's eye level when you can do so without crowding it.
3. Tap the face to focus. Focus-lock gestures vary by phone and camera app.
4. Take several photos or use burst mode if your phone supports it.
5. Leave room around the ears, paws and tail if you want a clean card cutout.

Have a photo you like already? Try the free cat card maker. For a verified catch in your PoCats album, take the photo with the app's live camera.

There is a cat sitting on the low wall outside the chip shop. It has already seen you. You have a short window before it either settles or leaves, and in that time most people do the same three things: walk straight at it, hold the phone up at chest height, and come away with one photo of a cat looking somewhere else.

Almost none of the fix is in the camera settings. Photographing a cat you have just met is mostly about where you put your body, how quickly you move, and whether you are willing to wait for something to happen. The phone part takes a minute to learn. The rest is manners.

Let the cat close the distance

Cats decide how near you get. If you take that decision away from them, the encounter is over and you get a photo of a tail going under a car. So stop further away than feels necessary, lower yourself, and let the cat do the arithmetic.

Walking directly at a cat, face on and upright, is the shape a predator makes. Come in on a curve instead, stop at an angle, and turn your shoulder towards the cat rather than your chest. Look slightly past it rather than into its eyes. A slow blink is a friendlier signal than a stare and costs you nothing to try.

If the cat comes to you, hold a hand low, at its nose height, and let it make contact on its own terms. Do not reach over the top of its head. That is a hand arriving from where a bird of prey would arrive, and even confident cats duck it.

Get down to their eye line

This is the single biggest change you can make, and it is free. A photo taken from standing height looks like security footage: a small animal seen from above, foreshortened, on a background of paving slabs. The same cat photographed from its own eye line becomes the subject of the picture.

So kneel. Or sit on the kerb. Or, if the ground is dry and you do not mind, lie down and rest your forearms on the pavement. You can go lower still by setting the phone flat on the ground and flipping it upside down, which puts the lens within a couple of centimetres of the surface. Shooting from very slightly below a cat's eye line gives it presence, which is the quality most street cat photos are missing.

Dropping your height also changes the background completely. From standing, your background is concrete. From the ground, it becomes the wall, the hedge, the shop doorway, or a soft band of distant sky. Glance behind the cat before you press anything. A bin lid growing out of a cat's head is the sort of thing you only notice at home.

The four phone settings that actually matter

Turn the flash off and leave it off

A sudden bright light in the face startles a cat, and a startled cat leaves. Flash also flattens the fur into a hard, textureless white and produces that reflective glare in the eyes, which comes from the mirrored layer behind a cat's retina that helps it see in low light. Set the flash to off rather than auto, because auto will fire the moment the light drops.

The phone torch is the same mistake with a longer duration. At night, work with light that is already there: a shop window, a porch lamp, the pool of light under a street lamp. Put that light behind you or to one side, keep still, and accept that some photos are not available tonight.

Focus on the eyes

Tap the cat's face on the screen to set focus and exposure there, then press and hold to lock it so the camera stops hunting for the wall behind. Some phones will find and hold an animal's eye by themselves, which is worth turning on if yours offers it. If the cat is at an angle and you can only get one eye sharp, make it the near one. A photo with a sharp far eye looks like a mistake, because it is.

Shoot a burst

Cats change expression faster than you can react. On most phones a long press on the shutter runs a burst, and on some you slide the shutter button instead. Holding the volume-down button works on a lot of Android phones. Fire ten or fifteen frames across the moment, then keep one and delete the rest. This is also the only reliable way to catch a yawn, a stretch or a head turn.

Leave the zoom alone

Pinching to zoom on most phones is a crop with extra steps, and it throws away the detail you need in the whiskers and fur. If your phone has a second, longer lens, use that button. Otherwise take the wider frame and crop it later at home. The two steps you did not take are worth more than the pixels you saved.

Wait for the ears to come forward

The difference between a snapshot and a photograph of a cat is usually the ears. Ears pricked forward, whiskers pushed out, pupils not blown wide: that is an interested, comfortable animal, and it reads instantly. Ears rotated back or flattened, body low and compact: that is a cat asking you to go away, and no amount of editing makes it look otherwise.

To bring the ears forward, make one small, novel sound. A soft click of the tongue, a fingernail on the wall, a rustle. Once. The second time it works less well and the third time you are nagging. There are apps that play distress and prey calls to make cats snap to attention, and they are not worth using on a pavement beside a road, because a frightened cat runs in the direction it happens to be facing.

Black cats, bright sun and railings

Black cats

Phone cameras meter for the whole frame, so a black cat on a pale pavement comes out as a cat-shaped hole with two eyes in it. Tap the cat's face, then drag the exposure slider up a notch or two. You want the fur a step brighter than the phone thinks it should be, so there is detail in the coat to work with.

Light matters more here than anywhere else. Look for light raking across the cat from the side rather than hitting it head on, because side light is what separates the head from the shoulder and puts a line along the whiskers. A single catchlight in the eye will hold the whole photo together, and a cat sitting in a doorway looking out at open sky gets you one for nothing. Where you can, choose a dark background over a bright one. A black cat against a shaded hedge with light on its face works. The same cat against white sky does not.

Bright sun

Midday sun is the worst light of the day for a cat: squinted eyes, black pits under the brow, a chest blown out to pure white. Wait for a cloud to cross, move round so the cat is in open shade, or come back in the first or last hour of daylight when the light is low and soft. Cats are often out and moving at those hours anyway.

If you are stuck with hard sun, put it behind the cat and expose for the face. That gives you a bright rim along the edge of the fur, which is one of the few genuinely flattering things strong sunlight does. What you never do is try to move the cat into better light. You wait, or you lose the photo.

Through railings and fences

Cats spend a lot of their lives behind bars of one sort or another. Push the lens right up against the gap so the metal is far too close to be rendered, and it more or less disappears. Two warnings. The autofocus will grab the nearest bar every time, so tap the cat and lock it. And never put a hand, an arm or a phone on a stick through railings into someone's garden. A cat behind a fence is at home. You are the stranger at the window.

Photographing a shy cat without pressuring it

A shy cat is a different animal from the one on the chip shop wall. It is under a parked car, or on top of a wall three houses down, or watching from a gap between wheelie bins. Every one of those places has one exit, which is why it chose the place.

1. Take the photo from exactly where you are standing, before you do anything else. A distant, honest frame is better than no frame and no cat.
2. Sit down and turn side on. You are trying to stop looking like a tall thing that is interested in the cat.
3. Move only when the cat looks away, and stop when it looks back. Two small moves and a long wait beats one confident walk.
4. Keep the phone low and slow. Raising a hand quickly to eye level is the gesture that ends most of these encounters.
5. Never take the last few steps. If a cat is under a car or in a hedge, approaching it corners it, whatever you intend.
6. Give up early and come back another day. Shy cats keep routines, and the second and third visits are always easier than the first.

Do not reach under cars, do not stand between a cat and the only gap it can leave through, and do not follow it if it moves off. Following is not photography.

Knowing when to stop

Two or three minutes is a long time in a cat's day. Watch for the tail beginning to flick, the ears starting to swivel, the skin twitching along the back, or a suddenly still, staring cat. Any of those means the photos are finished, and the polite move is to look away and let the cat decide what happens next. If it gets up and goes, that is the end of it.

A few other things worth having decided in advance. If somebody comes out of the house, say plainly what you are doing. Most people are pleased and some are not, and both answers are fine. If a cat looks thin, matted, injured, or has runny eyes, take no more photos and ring a local cat rescue or vet practice instead. If you find a kitten on its own, leave it where it is and watch from a distance before calling anyone, because the mother is very often nearby and moving her litter one at a time. And leave the wall the way you found it, with no food and no litter behind you.

The short version

• Stop early, come in at an angle, and let the cat close the last of the gap.
• Get down to its eye line, or lower.
• Flash off. Tap the eyes, lock the focus, shoot a burst.
• Skip the digital zoom and crop later instead.
• Brighten the exposure for a dark cat, and hunt for side light and a catchlight.
• Avoid midday sun. Shade and the ends of the day are kinder to fur and to eyes.
• Watch the ears. When they go back, you are done.

I make a free iPhone and Android game called PoCats that is built entirely around this: you photograph a real cat you meet outdoors, the photo goes to a verification service that confirms there is a living cat in it and cuts it from its background, and you end up with a card of that particular cat in an album, cut from your own photograph rather than drawn. It carries no advertising. It is worth saying what the cutting-out part means for your photography, because it is not marketing, it is the thing I had to learn myself. A cat photographed side on in even light with clear space around its outline cuts cleanly. A cat half under a car, or behind railings, or lit from behind by white sky, does not. Photos are processed for verification and background removal and saved with your collection. They are not posted publicly by the app; sharing a card is your choice. See the privacy policy for the services involved.

None of this needs the app, though. The tabby on the wall outside the chip shop is worth two minutes of patience and a low, quiet crouch either way, and the photo you get from doing it properly is one you will still like next year.

Questions people ask

Free tools for your next cat encounter

Make a keepsake with the cat card maker, using a photo you own. For your next walk, the body language decoder reads a cat's tail, ears and eyes back to you, and the street cat name generator names the one that has been sitting on your wall all summer.

Where this fits in PoCats

PoCats is a cat spotting game: you photograph a real cat you meet, it is checked as a living animal, and it becomes a collectible card cut from your own picture. The catch itself is a two-second timing moment you can try in your browser, and the whole loop is explained here.