Sleeping Cat - Need feedback on close up shots and detail in photos

[TechArtist]

Desert Sleeping | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

So this is a picture I took of my cat sleeping. My goal with this was to get the head in focus with a little bit of detail bleeding in to the background along the body of the cat and keeping the rest of the depth of field. The problem was(not only did I not remove a couple objects from the background, so those had to be obviously Photoshopped and the same went with the blue glow that was on the left side of my cats head where the natural light was hitting it, just wasn't sure how to fix that properly so I left it desaturated) the really didn't even focus on the head that much. The detail was like I had a bit of motion blur even though my camera was still. It took an unsharp mask after some sharping with Lightroom to get any good detail and even that didn't work out so well.

That is also another issue I've been having. Is getting any kind of crisp detail in my photos. Thoughts?

 

[KenC]

I'm not completely sure what is bothering you about this. What's in focus looks sharp at least at this size. I clicked on it to try to look at a larger version, but my work computer couldn't open it in any reasonable time. I'm not sure what you mean about the "detail" - where it's sharp I can make out the colors and textures and where it's not you wouldn't expect to see much detail. As for the lighting, this looks like mixed lighting - sunlight from the window and some sort of lamp to the left. This will never look right unless you just want to depict what something looks like under mixed lighting, in which case you don't need to do much adjusting. As it is it's a nice picture of your cat in his/her environment and I don't tend to be picky about the artistic merits of my own cat pictures. One suggestion is to move around while paying attention to the background. In this shot the window is very bright and distracting - better to get it out of the frame.

 

[paigew]

looks sharp to me. nice photo

 

[TechArtist]

Kenc:
Here is the original photo no editing(make sure your viewing both in full as it looks sharper when it's small):
http://i48.tinypic.com/dm4p6f.jpg

It just looks like there was some motion blur or something to it. It's just to me it has a weird feel to it. Perhaps it is just me being overly picky but it just seems off and lacking of sharpness even in the edited photo.

 

[paigew]

okay I just checked your exif data. Your shutter speed was set to 1/25!! WAY too slow, up that to at least 1/180 and you should notice a difference.

 

[TechArtist]

Ah. The problem I keep having is, if I up my shutter speed, ecpesially in the lighting I was working with, I always have to up my ISO alot to get enough lighting where my photo doesn't become underexposed. I tend to rely on my light meter quite a bit and I am finding that isn't always accurate. Do you have any tips to help me be able to shoot at a proper shutter speed without having to up the ISO which I know adds noise to the image.

 

[paigew]

embrace the noise love the grain

iso 3200

 

[EDL]

Clicking in to full size it looks like a 2-shot stack with the shots misaligned (best way I can describe it)....definitely some movement that caused that and after reading above about the EXIF...1/25 shutter...yeah, definitely movement.