I was at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok, Thailand, but there was this cat.
I was roaming around the temple with a 60mm lens on my Nikon D810. My goal for that visit was faces. Namely the varied faces on each of the statues that lined several of the courtyards of the temple.
Of course, I am not one to pass up an opportunity to photograph a cat, and there were temple cats all over the place.
Most of them however were a bit wary of photographers, which made photographing them a bit difficult with the equipment I had on me.
Then I came across a cat that had a pair of the most startling beautiful opal eyes I’d personally seen on a cat. I just had to get a photo.
Fortunately the cat itself was friendly and didn’t run away.
I approached it slowly, and laid down on the ground. My next task was to get a decent image of it looking directly into the camera. The cat had other plans. It was busy scent making all the stuff around it in a prelude to approaching me, probably in the hopes that I had some food.
Crawling around and with an arm outstretched, I slowly coaxed it away from any objects it could rub its face on. Once that was accomplished that thankfully stuck this pose and held it. Lying flat on my belly, camera in one hand with that elbow braced on the ground, I reached up with my other hand and tapped the top of the lens with my fingernails.
The noise was enough to get the cat to look right into the camera for a split second, which was all the time I needed.
To this day, this remains one of my favorite photos I’ve taken of a cat.
