C&C Request: Cat Portrait

[Cortian]

This is Bentley, one of our three cats. (Very photogenic, too .)

Saw an opportunity and snapped this photo with my Tamron 90mm Macro lens earlier today. Looked at the back of the camera and realized I might have inadvertently snapped a pretty good cat portrait.

This is cropped just a wee bit off the left and top of the original. Otherwise un-retouched.

Looking for C&C on it.

 

[bulldurham6 1]

FOCUS...too soft, too out of.

 

[Cortian]

Thanks, @bulldurham , but...

Yes, most of the cat is OOF, but his face, eyes and the front of his ears aren't. At least not to my eye.

This

is a similar kind of at the spur-of-the-moment shot that is OOF. (Actually, I think he was in focus, but I was too sloppy, even with IS, for 1/25 shutter speed. I'm not even going to try to save this one.)

Or do I just not have a very fine eye for focus?

 

[Designer]

S O F F F F T focus. Purrrr.

Very petable.

My negative is that the light should have been more toward the front, not from behind.

 

[katsrevenge]

Lovely and soft.

Maybe lighten the eyes a tiny bit? So they have that cat-glow..? (not the scary demon from hades in the shadows thing, but my cats's eyes always look like they are reflecting some light, even in dimness. )

 

[Cortian]

Thanks for the pointers and complements, Designer and katsrevenge.

Wow, everybody's saying it's soft, so I guess it is. Now I'm beginning to wonder if my eyes can even tell the difference between sharp and not-sharp.

 

[Designer]

Wow, everybody's saying it's soft, so I guess it is. Now I'm beginning to wonder if my eyes can even tell the difference between sharp and not-sharp.

The cat's face is sharp, but everything behind the chin and ears is way OOF.

 

[smoke665]

To me the focus seems to be about the top whisker on the right side. The eyes are already getting soft. Try this. First set your camera to an ISO high enough to get your shutter speed up to at least 1/160 or more, and your aperture up to at least f5.6. Set your auto focus to spot mode. Put the spot directly on the eye you want in focus. If your camera supports it, you can push the shutter release half way down to focus, then without releasing pressure recompose and push the shutter button down the rest of the way to take the shot. This will retain the focus on the first spot.

 

[katsrevenge]

Thanks for the pointers and complements, Designer and katsrevenge.

Wow, everybody's saying it's soft, so I guess it is. Now I'm beginning to wonder if my eyes can even tell the difference between sharp and not-sharp.

To me the softness is some of the charm. Fits your subject.

 

[bulldurham6 1]

The OOF/Softness is not due to your eye (though you might want to check the fine focus on your diopter) but instead due to camera shake. Some cameras will allow some compensation for sppeds in the 1/25 sec range but not all and not all the same. Also, unless I am crazier than a March hare, and I am pretty sure I am not, the first image you are now showing was not the image I critiqued, but instead it was the second image. In the second image, I did some pretty aggressive sharpening to show the issue was with camera shake and not necessarily your eye.

 

[Cortian]

The OOF/Softness is not due to your eye (though you might want to check the fine focus on your diopter) but instead due to camera shake.

We're talking about different things, BD. See later.

Yes, the second image is soft. Almost to the point of blurry. I would have deleted it except to make the point I made earlier. And, yes: It is due to either camera shake or the cat moved. (I adjusted the diopter, and triple-checked it, when I got the camera body. I was using AF for both, in any event.)

Also, unless I am crazier than a March hare, and I am pretty sure I am not, the first image you are now showing was not the image I critiqued, but instead it was the second image.

Nope: The first photo was the one I originally posted and you critiqued. The second one was taken three days later. Temporary crazier than a March hare, maybe?

In the second image, I did some pretty aggressive sharpening to show the issue was with camera shake and not necessarily your eye.

When I wrote "Now I'm beginning to wonder if my eyes ..." I was talking about my opinion of the image I posted vs. the feedback I was getting.

Maybe we're running into a question of... terminology? Between the back-lighting causing a halo effect and the cat's face to be dimly-lit relative to his surroundings, and the shallow DoF: Yes, the... overall composition (?) is soft. But the cat's face, which, to me, is the focal point (subject?) of the photo, is sharp. (@smoke665: Single-point focus, was aiming right between his eyes, but the camera's in AI Focus mode, so it may have shifted. Your suggestions noted. See following comment, though.)

Most of my photos so far have been opportunistic, and I'm not good enough with the camera, yet, to make the right adjustments quickly. So I'm still relying a lot on automation. The cat had been napping. That was what I was going to shoot. Of course: As soon as I walked back in with the camera he woke up and got up. Then he sat down and looked directly at the camera. *click* - before he moved.

And that's how that photo happened. I don't think I would never had thought to have tried to do that on-purpose. Not with that lighting. As it is I'm lucky to have had IS and that he apparently didn't budge so much as a fraction of an inch, given:

Exposure Time : 1/100
F Number : 2.8
Exposure Program : Program AE
ISO : 400

Thanks, everybody, for your comments, suggestions and kind words (Yes, @katsrevenge, he's very soft .)

 

[smoke665]

Most of my photos so far have been opportunistic, and this one was no different.

The half click method I advised becomes second nature. With practice you hardly notice a delay. With opportunistic shots, you still need to plan ahead. Unless you're well practiced, 1/100 shutter speed is hard to hold without some shake. By raising your shutter speed up you eliminate not only hand shake but subject movement. Same thing with a wide open aperture. If you have time to set up the shot, focus, and snap fine. There's nothing wrong with the narrow DOF as an artistic expression, but if you're faced with a split second shot it would be better to up your aperture to gain DOF. 400 ISO isn't that high, with current technology (camera and processing), 800-3200 ISO is easily in reach.

 

[KmH]

This is cropped just a wee bit off the left and top of the original. Otherwise un-retouched.

Looking for C&C on it.

After the crop, composition wise it's good.
Light wise your cat is underexposed.
There is a visual art truism that's about 2000 years old - Light advances, dark recedes.
In other words if your primary subject is brighter than the background the subject 'pops' out at the viewer.

Since it's "otherwise un-retouched" it isn't 'finished'.
If had the camera set to make an in-the-camera JPEG it was retouched first by the 16-bit depth Raw conversion application in the camera, you have zero control over, and then again by the necessarily crude 8-bit depth JPEG program in the camera.

All digital images start as a Raw image file.
DSLR cameras, and some other digital camera types, give us the option of recording the Raw file to the memory card so we can then use an external Raw converter to do initial editing of the image file, as a ready-to-print JPEG, or as a TIFF file.

I opened your JPEG in Photoshop Camera Raw (which is also the Lightroom Develop module). My Camera Raw is set to a 16-bit color depth and the ProPhoto RGB color space.
I boosted (slid the slider to the right) the mid-tone contrast (Clarity), Vibrance, and Shadows.
I boost the mid-tone contrast and vibrance of the vast majority of the digital images I make.

I then moved the image from Camera Raw to Photoshop proper. There I add .05" of black canvas (Image > Canvas) using the Relative option.
Because of my Camera Raw settings, for online display I have to change both the bit depth to 8-bits and change the color space to sRGB, so I did that too.
Of course it's went into Ps as a JPEG, so it's still a JPEG. I set the Quality to 3 out of 12 so the file size is down to 355k.

 

[Derrel]

Second shot (below) shows blurring issues, due to the 1/25 second shutter time, not so much focus as blurring...the eys and whiskers appear to be in-focus to me, but the speed is causing some blurring.

Thanks, @bulldurham , but...

Yes, most of the cat is OOF, but his face, eyes and the front of his ears aren't. At least not to my eye.

This

is a similar kind of at the spur-of-the-moment shot that is OOF. (Actually, I think he was in focus, but I was too sloppy, even with IS, for 1/25 shutter speed. I'm not even going to try to save this one.)

Or do I just not have a very fine eye for focus?