calico cat portrait for c&c

[goffgirl]

Recently, I have been working on pet portraits. I borrowed a 24-120mm lens one weekend and used it on the unwitting victim seen below. Is the chair in the background too distracting? What post-processing would you recommend?

f4, 65mm, 1/30, ISO 250

 

[TamiAz]

Beautiful cat!!! The picture looks great to me, but I'm brand new to photography.

 

[KmH]

Next time move the chair and what ever was under it.

Crop it square, remove distracting elements in the photo if you want, sharpen, and increase the mid-tone contrast.

 

[Ballistics]

Exactly what I imagined when I saw the OPs shot. Good job.

 

[Ron Evers]

I like the crop & the deletion of the background but the image seems to me over-sharpened.

Maybe a Marmalade not a Calico?

 

[BlackSheep]

I agree with the above comments, but in addition, your cat's paws are very out of focus, which IMO detracts from the shot too. I do like the setting you chose, though (without the chair in the background); the colours work well with your cat's colouring, and the lines of the window work well to focus the eye in the right place.

 

[goffgirl]

I agree with the above comments, but in addition, your cat's paws are very out of focus, which IMO detracts from the shot too.

That's true. As a habit, I tend to shoot with a wide open aperture, hence the OOF paws.


As regards the background, I'll work on removing the distracting elements. I'm such a newbie at Photoshop, it takes me forever!

 

[KenC]

I agree with the tighter crop, although the chair doesn't really bother me nor do the oof paws. However it does bother me that so much of the cat is just black with no detail. On a partially black cat, you're going to have a little solid black, but here there is too much and it detracts from the appearance of the cat, especially where the left front leg and chest blend together. A reflector or fill flash would have been useful here.

 

[biggoron]

beautiful cat. great pic. but my eyes went right to the OOF paws.

 

[KmH]

That's true. As a habit, I tend to shoot with a wide open aperture, hence the OOF paws.

There are not to many lenses that perform at their peak when used wide open, including variable aperture zoom lenses that have a wide maximum aperture of f/3.5, f/4, or smaller.

 

[ManhattanShutterBug]

I like the crop & the deletion of the background but the image seems to me over-sharpened.

Maybe a Marmalade not a Calico?

I agree it does look over sharpened.

I like the photo but I think it would look better in landscape rather then portrait and zoom in and eliminate the wasted space around, and the out of focus paws are distracting.