Photographing Cats - Tips and tricks?

[Ginger Pixie]

So, I got a new 50mm prime lens (Canon Mark II f1.8) for Christmas. I love the lens - it's making me work much harder to compose a shot, especially of my cats who don't tend to hang around very long.

Dora is very dark and Artemis very light, so they pose different problems with exposure and white balance. I would be grateful to receive any comments or critique on any of the shots, or any tips you could share. All were taken at f2.8, as I heard this was the sweet spot of the lens and it is much easier to focus on a (generally) moving target.

These are all SOOC

Camera Canon EOS 450D
Exposure 0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture f/2.8
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 200
Strobist info: 1 strobe bounced off ceiling right on 1/4 power,
1 strobe on 1/32 from below
+ natural light from window front left.

Camera Canon EOS 450D
Exposure 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture f/2.8
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 400
In this shot I tried to balance the light from the window on the left with flash bounced off the ceiling at 1/4 power and using a reflector angled directly in front of Dora.

Camera Canon EOS 450D
Exposure 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture f/2.8
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 400
Exposure Bias 0 EV
Flash Off, Did not fire
(slightly annoying magenta cast on this due to bright pink walls - have had a play with white balance settings pp but couldn't get it to look right - help?)

[RLucas]

Cats are fun! We have an orange tabby and a tortoise colored one much like the second photo you posted. The biggest thing I have noticed, much like shooting scenes that are mostly light, or mostly dark, you want to under/over expose accordingly. For my cat shots. I use spot metering. For the dark cat I will meter off the darkest part I can find and underexpose about one full stop. This will usually get it about right. Do the opposite for the lighter cat and overexpose. You may have to play with it a little to get it right, but one stop either way usually does it for me. I am only using ambient/available light at the moment as well. I don't have any strobes.

As far as the color cast goes. You can create a fill layer over the original. I used the bucket fill and filled it with bright green. I changed the blend mode to overlay and reduced the opacity to about 12%. I still had to do a curves adjustment on the green channel to pull some of it out of the highlights. Hope this helps!

[Ginger Pixie]

Originally Posted by RLucas

Cats are fun! We have an orange tabby and a tortoise colored one much like the second photo you posted. The biggest thing I have noticed, much like shooting scenes that are mostly light, or mostly dark, you want to under/over expose accordingly. For my cat shots. I use spot metering. For the dark cat I will meter off the darkest part I can find and underexpose about one full stop. This will usually get it about right. Do the opposite for the lighter cat and overexpose. You may have to play with it a little to get it right, but one stop either way usually does it for me. I am only using ambient/available light at the moment as well. I don't have any strobes.

As far as the color cast goes. You can create a fill layer over the original. I used the bucket fill and filled it with bright green. I changed the blend mode to overlay and reduced the opacity to about 12%. I still had to do a curves adjustment on the green channel to pull some of it out of the highlights. Hope this helps!

Thank you so much for going to the trouble of demonstrating how to get rid of a colour cast. I would never have thought of that. I was trying the click white balance when processing the RAW file, but it wasn't looking right. I will experiment with this method, thank you

I was always trying to shoot over with the dark cat, maybe that is what I was doing wrong!