Furry gray monster - C&C please

[The Losing Kind]

I'm pleased with it- how about you?

(Grainy due to high ISO; tried to minimize it as much as possible)​

 

[Wild Style]

Pretty cat,

a little under exposed. I don't know but the plant sort of distracts me for some reason.

 

[passerby]

The plant next to it seem slightly out of focus, isn't the olympus has the anti shake built in it? What ISO did you use for this?

 

[The Losing Kind]

Pretty cat,

a little under exposed. I don't know but the plant sort of distracts me for some reason.

Thanks for commenting. I couldn't get a good enough shot with my flash (only have an on-camera flash), so I settled for underexposure in order to get the shot. Next time I will try to move the plant out of the shot, or at least get it behind the cat.

The plant next to it seem slightly out of focus, isn't the olympus has the anti shake built in it? What ISO did you use for this?

Yes, the olympus has the anti-shake, but it's more of a bother than a help in a lot of cases. It takes a few seconds, and the cat was moving around a lot so I needed to take the photograph fairly quickly. I believe that the plant is out of focus because it's in the foreground, and I was focusing on the cat in the midground. The ISO was either 800 or 1000. I was using a tripod, for the record.

 

[johngpt]

The dark frame of the window is nicely situated, its composition very much like that of an oil painting. It creates another frame within which the cat's head and eyes are on the 1/3 junctions, drawing attention to the eyes. Great color by the way.

Well yes, the left plant is out of focus, but that prevents it from distracting too much from the cat's eyes. It prevents the viewer's eyes from wandering out of the left side of the picture. The swirl of the cat's tail draws the viewer's eyes back to the well lit stool, which draws the viewer's eyes to the cat's eyes again.

Some photo pundits would say that there is dead space to the right of the window frame, and that there is dead space to the left of the cat. They would advise cropping more tightly on the cat. And of course that would create a nice, but different image from the one you've built. Coming from a painting background, I like your composition as is.

If you're not averse to 'photoshopping' an image, as in the old dark room days, one could dodge the cat's eyes, to lighten them, then selectively increase the cat's eyes' contrast, and that would further draw the viewer's attention to the central aspect of your image.