Is this cat photo real? If so, how was it done?

[cmyk]

@Jenaroph

I wouldn’t say definitively it’s not a photoshop, but there are a couple of details that look real to me:

1: the perspective of the stacked baskets is correct. You’re looking down on the bottom basket, and slightly up at the top basket. This is not a case of sticking one basket on the floor at a time and then pasting them together in layers; those baskets were either stacked when the photo was taken or somebody took a great deal of care to take a picture of each one at a slightly different angle. Stacking them is the easier way.

2: the shadows and lighting on the cats. Each cat’s fur has some reflected light from its basket and the colors are very good; the cat in the pink basket has pink reflecting on the bottom of its face and some blue on its back from above, the one in the green basket has green etc. If someone took a picture of a stack of empty baskets and photoshopped cats into them, that’s a detail that is likely to be overlooked. Especially since the effect isn’t equally visible for all the cats, because of the white baskets, or dark colored cats. I’d say the cats were likely in the baskets when the photo was taken.

3. The shadows of the baskets themselves are consistent. Given the shadow on the floor, they’re lit from somewhere almost directly overhead, and that is not contradicted either by the shadow on the wall or the lighting of the cats in their baskets.

The baskets are designed to be stacked and I don’t think they’re quite as precarious as they look. The most questionable part really is, how do you get seven cats to do the same thing at the same time? I suppose it might be a case of multiple photos of the same stack of baskets with different cats in them at different times, until they got a full stack’s worth of cats each looking at the camera, but I can’t say that for sure.

+1

[XRaeth]

The first rule of cats and boxes:

Boxes contain cats.

[Idle_Thoughts]

@MizTina

But if it’s real, props to the human got them to sit so calm and quiet all together like that.

Definitely.

[phouka]

@XRaeth

The first rule of cats and boxes:

Boxes contain cats.

I would amend this to state that anything flat will be covered by a cat, and anything with space and defining boundaries will contain a cat. YMMV.

[Rachellelogram]

Maybe it just LOOKS like the baskets are precariously stacked. It would be really easy to nail together a totem pole using the baskets, then secure the back of it to a wall, turning it into a cat-fortress which isn’t able to be knocked over. Cats could jump in and out of something like that at will. It’d just be a matter of waiting for all of them to be in it.

[Little_Nemo]

Catching seven cats all in motion at the same time? Impossible.

Catching seven cats all lying around doing nothing at the same time? Not hard at all.