Go West, Young Photographer

About six months ago, I was at an adopt-a-thon at Petsmart, and there was a staff member from the West region of TAS working with us. She mentioned (jokingly, I think) that it would be great if I did photos for their shelter as well. Never joke with me about shelter photos! I immediately asked if I could go do photos for West every so often.

 Since then, I think I've gone about four times. It's an interesting experience. For one thing, we have Fred at TAS South, so I never do dog photos. To be honest, I'm not very good at them, but I've taken a few stabs at it for West. Some of the results were nice, like that boy up there from a few months ago, and some were not worth posting (live and learn!).

TAS West is much smaller than South - it's the smallest of the four shelters. They don't house small animals, and they only have one adoption room for cats (as opposed to our 4 rooms + 4 windows).  Thanks to the small number of animals, I can usually get through all the cats in a couple of hours, a task that would take me a couple of days at South.
My most recent trip was last week, and this time I asked if I could post a few results. So here are our guest cats of the week, all to be found at TAS West:

This handsome fellow doesn't have a name yet. He was quite an independent cat, not particularly cuddly but certainly amiable.

Kittens are usually a nightmare to photograph, but I usually have good luck with the West kitties. This little munchkin is named Dexter and he's 4 months old.

I'm glad I got a decent photo of Simba here, because his website photo shows him as a newborn. Adorable of course, but he looks a bit different now!

It's a good exercise, trying to get every cat done. Some cats require quite a bit of patience for them to calm down enough to stand still for a photo, but I got this shot of Lynx on the first try.

One particularly nice thing about West is that several of their cages are bright white, as opposed to the mostly metallic South cages. This means that for cats who aren't keen on coming out of the cage (such as Minnie here), you can still get a nice shot.

This was my favourite shot of the day, and this kitten was totally lovable - and of course, she got adopted while I was there! Of course, that's brilliant. But it does figure that my favourite photo wasn't even needed! Hey, I guess that's why I have a blog, right?

And finally we have Iris - a good photo of a black cat is the most satisfying shot to get. Black cats are infamous for having a hard time at getting adopted, and one of the reasons for this is that they don't photograph well at all. They might be gorgeous, but it's so very difficult to make them look like anything other than a bug-eyed mass of black fur. Luckily, I think Iris looks a bit better than that!

So if you're in Etobicoke, and you have a car (because it is seriously irritating to get there by transit, although not impossible), stop by TAS West!