Frequent visitors of this blog probably know that I’m mostly fascinated by portraits. Human portraits, that is. I find it most challenging to catch a person’s character in a shot by using the proper pose, composition and lightning. But every now and then you come across situations where you can take non-human portraits. Of your pets (domestic animals), for instance. As it happens, as of last week we have a new kitten. No big deal, millions of families have cats, but I must admit that these little kittens are irresistable. You simply have to take their picture. They beg you for it. They will put themselves on a chair and look it you as if they’re saying “you’re going to take my picture, or what?”.
So it happened. The kitten was sitting in one of our armchairs in the living room next to a big window. So without giving it a second thought, I grabbed my camera. Put it to 800 ISO and full aperture (f/2.8) and simply took a couple of shots with just the available light. Because I found the sharpness to be a bit sub-optimal, I took another series at 400 ISO (with slightly longer shutter speeds), but resulting in fractionally better sharpness. I like to think, at least. The only post-processing I did was a tiny increase of contrast (by using the familiar S-curve) and the application of a darken/lighten center filter of Color Efex Pro 3.0. And a tiny bit of glamour glow on the first shot. It behaved like a little film star, so I thought the filter was appropriate. Anyway, the results are below, so have a look and let me know what you think. Kitten portraits with available light.
