Shooting

“I wanted a cat’s-eye view of my neighbor’s pet, so I set my Canon PowerShot G9 on the step of my stoop and waited for her to get accustomed to it,” says San Francisco-based artist and healthcare worker Darwin Bell. “Because the camera was a nonthreatening compact, she wasn’t disturbed by it.”Soon enough, he reached down, pressed the shutter, and nabbed this beauty. His tips for feline photos:

You can get lucky with light. Of course, you can buy expensive gear and study this essential craft at the feet of the masters, but sometimes your success with lighting will come down to a single variable: Being in the right light at exactly the right time.But this success requires more than simple luck. You have to recognize great light when you see it and manage to leap into action to capture it. That’s how Theophilos Papadopoulos, a Greek high school teacher, bagged the beauty above.

Ever wish you could customize your DSLR (or ILC, or advanced compact) to make it work exactly the way you wanted? Or to make it better somehow—to make operation faster, to boost stamina, to better match a specific shooting situation, or even to make it a special-purpose camera? You can pretty much do it, with adjustments ranging from simple, no-cost setting tweaks up to physical modification of the camera.