Picture Perfect: The Art of Photobombing

Did you know that photobombing is an art? Yep. It’s an art. A photographer often goes to great pains to capture a shot, only to have it upstaged by a photobomber. And, it’s not a “lost” art, but rather one that runs rampant on the internet, usually because the photobomb is hilarious, celebrity involved or an unfortunate (and usually funny) set of circumstances that happens just as the photographer snaps the shot.

My gorgeous cat, A Boy Named Coco, has mastered this particular art (photobombing) to perfection! Setting up food for a photo shoot takes a bit of time. It’s not the same kind of photography as going out-and-about and capturing people, nature, landscapes, sunsets, etc. as they unfold around you. Rather food photography takes thought, time, effort, staging, etc. to attempt to get a photo that’s usable.

And, almost without fail, just when I’ve set the stage, the lighting is perfect, the food is ready – boom! In jumps Coco! And, Coco can jump up anywhere in our house and I mean, literally, anywhere. When he’s bored, I find him up on top of cabinets. He jumps from the countertops to the top of the cabinets. He does this in our laundry room, hallway and even my office.

While this probably hasn’t happened to many people, I’ve had all the following happen to me:

The kitchen cabinets have fallen off the wall and landed on the countertops. Yep; I’ve had kitchen cabinets fall off the wall! I had loaded them with too many heavy objects and the anchor bolts failed. Boom! Down they came with a deafening crash!
I’ve also had a pot rack fall out of the ceiling. Again, I loaded it with too many heavy pots and didn’t use the right anchor bolts. In the middle of the night, we (Charlie and I) heard a deafening crash. Concerned that we had an intruder, we skulked along our hallway, in the dark, bat in hand, to meet our nemesis only to find pots and pans everywhere and a cracked tile counter!
And, I’ve had my master closet rod pull out from the wall and crash with a boom! Clothes everywhere! That happened when I replaced all of my plastic hangers with those felted hangers, you know, the ones that are made of steel and then covered with a felted material so that your clothes stay on the hanger? Well, apparently, some closet rods aren’t bolted into the wall at frequent enough intervals to support conversion to steel-framed hangers (fair warning)!

Do you see a pattern here?

But, hey, the kitchen cabinet-maker and installer should know that women stuff their kitchen cabinets full of stuff and should have planned for that contingency accordingly! I don’t think that was really my fault!

But, I digress…back to Coco…

The first time he jumped up on top of our kitchen cabinets, I was fearful that my kitchen cabinets would fall off the wall, again, if my cat jumped up there (thus injuring my precious feline). So, in self-defense, I have placed a collection of pitchers on top of our kitchen cabinets to prevent him from going there again! So, he jumps on top of the laundry room cabinets, the hallway cabinets and my office cabinets.

And, he jumps into the middle of my food photo shoots! Here’s his most recent upstaging of my food staging: