We just had a professional photographer come over and photograph the bunch
at our house...  We found that different things worked for different
ferrets.  When high-pitched notes are played on a harmonica, Fez just
freezes and stares in that direction - so it was easy to get shots of him
by blowing the harmonica from behind the photographer!  Shadow is entranced
by the sound of the raisin container rattling - of course, the photographer
had to put up with our shaking the container right next to his head, but it
DID work!  P B Floyd refused to sit still without linatone - and thus the
photo we got of him has his tongue sticking out of his mouth (we caught him
mid-lick!).  Falstaff and Butter we just got lucky with.  Basically, it all
depends on the particular ferret.  However, one thing we did that helped a
lot with all of the gang was to put the ferrets up on a 2-drawer file
cabinet - they at least had to hesitate and decide to jump off before
getting out of range.  Also, the cabinet was against a wall, so they had to
jump off in the front, not the behind (so you could catch them while they
were thinking about it).  The photographer had a large painted canvas as a
backdrop, so we just draped that over the file cabinets and against the
wall - so you can't see that its a file cabinet in the photos.  There was
excess fabric at the bottom, so it was a soft fall when they DID jump, but
this still gave a couple precious extra seconds with which to shoot!
 
-rochelle
[Posted in FML issue 1469]