I follow Doug Thomas’s wonderful blog about his gorgeous cat Andy. Andy is a Persian with supposedly black fur, but he seems to reflect light differently every time he’s photographed and, as a result, he treats our eyes to a whole spectrum of glorious monochrome. He can go from Black Hole of Anti-Matter to Silverback Gorilla to Fifty Shades of Grey in the space of weeks, days or even hours.
Louis Catorze, on the other hand, just looks black, although he can mix it up a bit by sometimes offering us, erm, black with a coating of unidentified garden crud. He’s not the glossy, velvety panther that most Chats Noirs are, but that’s just our lot in life and we have to accept it.
At the end of last month I commented on one of Doug’s posts, in which Andy’s fur looked painted in oil pastel and delicately, painstakingly smudged by hand. Doug replied that the portrait setting on his camera happens to bring out this feature of Andy’s beautiful fur.
I have a portrait setting on my iPhone, too, yet it does the opposite to Catorze: rather than accentuating his soft edges, it slices them off entirely and sharpens his soft little face. Here are two pictures of him in the same pose, with and without the portrait setting, taken seconds apart, and you can see that he looks like two entirely different cats:
Whilst I think he certainly looks sleeker and tidier in the second picture, sleek and tidy don’t scream “Catorze” to me (and have probably never been used in a sentence alongside his name). And seeing these images together has made me question all the photos I’ve ever taken of him using the portrait setting. Have I been misrepresenting him to the world? Have you all been catfished by Catorze?
I’d love to hear your opinions. Which photo do you prefer?
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
louiscatorze.com 
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