What It's Like to Be a Professional Cat Portraitist

Sign us up for this job: Elite cat photographer. Larry Johnson, an animal photographer of some renown, travels around the country going to cat shows and taking elegant portraits of felines. Filmmaker Mark Zemel followed him around a cat show in Parsippany, N.J. as he worked his photographic magic on the show kitties, posing them on crushed velvet backgrounds and attempting to draw out their personalities in various ways. 

Yes, sometimes the cats run away from the camera and need to be chased down. The job entails a lot more playing with cat toys than you might expect, and exactly as much stubborn feline resistance as you think. “You have to get them into doing their own thing with you,” Johnson says in the film.

Warning: You may suffer from adorable kitty overload.