Cat be Catting

This is Jaws. Jaws likes to come and sit on my computer, regardless of whether it open or closed and then just stare. Sometimes she stares at me, sometimes she stares at the window. Most of the time she has what I can only describe as a confused look on her face. Jaws is not a smart cat. Jaws is easily the stupidest cat to ever choose to occupy the same space as me. But she does know that if she sits on my computer then eventually food will appear in the magic bowl nearby. She always sits very upright too, a bit like a gargoyle really, which amuses me.

I don’t have the greatest range of lenses for indoors where the light levels are significantly lower and obviously if I got up to turn the ceiling light on the cat would inevitably move. So once again I turned to my trusty 25mm f1.7 lens. Converting from Micro Four Thirds to 35mm standard that would be a 50mm lens which isn’t perfect for this type of portrait but it isn’t horrible either and being a fast prime I was able to minimize noise in the image while maintaining an acceptable shutter speed.

I tried a few variations on this shot, some including more of the cat and some including less, but in the end this was my favorite composition. The eyes line up nicely with the upper third line and you see enough of her body to get a sense of her posture without the rather cluttered background (it’s the living room of a family with two teenage boys, tidy isn’t really a thing we do) distracting the viewers eye and minimizing the impact of the image. The focal point of course was the cat’s eye and everything leads out from there.

My editing on this one was very basic. I did tweak the white balance a little, but not much as the grey walls allowed the camera to do a pretty good job on this. I darkened the background a bit with a radial filter and bumped the texture slider up a touch on another radial filter to bring out the texture of the cat’s fur a bit. That’s about it, nothing fancy going on here just a solid composition speaking for itself.