Year In Pictures: 2010/02/22
Feb. 22nd, 2010 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqWhen she's not busy trying to steal food off the table, or otherwise getting into mischief, Belladonna likes to curl up under my chin while I'm at my computer.
She makes it awkward to type, or to do much other than pet her at that point but she is OK with that. I held the camera out at arm's length to get this shot, and if you take a close look at her eyes you can see the arm and camera reflected there (a little less pronounced in this version of the picture than in the original because I darkened her eyes just a touch).
On a slightly related note, is there anyone out there who would be interested if I started posting more technical details about the pictures? What I mean by that is a short abstract about what I was trying to achieve with the picture, how I took it, and what post-processing I did before I uploaded it. Here is an example of what I mean.
What I was hoping to capture in this shot was a candid picture of Belladonna in a typical situation; in this case, curled up under my chin and purring up a storm.
As I do with all of my shots these days, I set the camera on full manual. I went with the shutter speed at 1/60, the ISO at 100 and the aperture at f/11. I set the flash to normal, attached the diffuser and then held the camera out at arm's length and then blindly shot what I hoped would capture the mood. As usual I took a few pictures and selected what I felt was the best of the lot.
I loaded the raw image into a photo editor and cropped out about 40% of it to make the cat the centre of interest. I created a levels layer and cranked down the exposure until the eyes were slightly less washed-out by the flash. Then I cleared the layer and carefully painted in her pupils to reduce the "green eye" in her right eye to a less obvious level.
I merged those layer and created a saturation layer, which I then over-saturated until her eyes looked completely unnatural. Again, I cleared it and carefully painted in the colour on her irises. Finally I adjusted the transparency of the layer until it was fairly subtle. I merged all of the layers and the result was what you see posted here.
She makes it awkward to type, or to do much other than pet her at that point but she is OK with that. I held the camera out at arm's length to get this shot, and if you take a close look at her eyes you can see the arm and camera reflected there (a little less pronounced in this version of the picture than in the original because I darkened her eyes just a touch).
On a slightly related note, is there anyone out there who would be interested if I started posting more technical details about the pictures? What I mean by that is a short abstract about what I was trying to achieve with the picture, how I took it, and what post-processing I did before I uploaded it. Here is an example of what I mean.
What I was hoping to capture in this shot was a candid picture of Belladonna in a typical situation; in this case, curled up under my chin and purring up a storm.
As I do with all of my shots these days, I set the camera on full manual. I went with the shutter speed at 1/60, the ISO at 100 and the aperture at f/11. I set the flash to normal, attached the diffuser and then held the camera out at arm's length and then blindly shot what I hoped would capture the mood. As usual I took a few pictures and selected what I felt was the best of the lot.
I loaded the raw image into a photo editor and cropped out about 40% of it to make the cat the centre of interest. I created a levels layer and cranked down the exposure until the eyes were slightly less washed-out by the flash. Then I cleared the layer and carefully painted in her pupils to reduce the "green eye" in her right eye to a less obvious level.
I merged those layer and created a saturation layer, which I then over-saturated until her eyes looked completely unnatural. Again, I cleared it and carefully painted in the colour on her irises. Finally I adjusted the transparency of the layer until it was fairly subtle. I merged all of the layers and the result was what you see posted here.
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Date: 2010-02-23 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
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