This first image under review is one that I captured a few weeks ago of my favorite photo subject: my cat. She’s named Lafayette after the town of West Lafayette, not the man Marquis de Lafayette. Although I guess the town is named after the man, so maybe she is named after the man just indirectly.
Nikon ZF | ƒ/2 | 1/250 | 40mm | ISO800
I adopted Laffy the summer after I graduated from Purdue University, and I’ve been taking photos of her since day one. It’s incredibly likely that she’ll be featured in many write-ups here on Kevin Takes Photos, so I figured I might as well start posting the pictures of her sooner rather than later.
Laffy’s coloring is a mix of tabby (stripes) and tortoise shell (patches) so she’s not a tabby or a tortie. She’s a torbie which gives her those two well defined sides of her face. Just like the Force, she has a light side and a dark side. I wanted to draw attention to those two sides of her face with this image, and I like the way that I’ve done that. The one sided light but also the slightly removed contrast which softens the image to mimic her softness. Those front paws look like cotton balls!
With this photo, I want to compare it to a couple of others related photos of Laffy to show the story of how this photo came to be and how it’s influenced some of my photography since. Let’s start with what this photo looked like right out of my camera.
There’s the obvious carpet in the bottom left of the frame, and the slightly less obvious piano foot pedals to the right of Laffy. Those were masked out with a pen tool set to the color of the background. But in addition to clearing the frame of any unnecessary distractions, I’ve also adjusted the color space of the image to enhance the texture I wanted to evoke. The shadow on Laffy’s left side was extended to further the “dark side” of her face, the white balance was adjusted to be based on Laffy’s crest to centralize that color in the image, and the contrast of the entire photo reduced to soften the details in her fur just slightly.
Looking at the two images, there’s not a lot of differences! The main story was always there, but I was able to make a few minor adjustments to enhance what vibe I wanted to communicate.
I really enjoyed discovering this photo and working to bring out the best of what I wanted to capture with it, and it’s had a few key impacts on the images I’ve taken since. I think that’s most evident in an experimental photoshoot I had for Laffy a few weeks ago where I set up some studio lighting and a makeshift backdrop in my kitchen. This was my first experiment with this type of lighting and I’m sure I’ll look back on this at some point and laugh at how little knew, but it was great learning opportunity!
I used two white umbrella lights with soft white temperature bulbs and two soft white flood lights for direct lighting one side of the frame. The scene was also lit by the large set of windows directly behind me as the photographer. This yielded, among others, the following photos.
This first photo, titled Lafayette’s Disgust, shows the impact of that black backdrop and also how bringing in additional lighting can let you really lose a lot background details to depth of field. Because my backdrop was a fuzzy felt blanket, you can see texture on it in the picture of my setup, but that texture is lost in the final product without anything done in post to it. The depth of field from the lens was shallow enough to entirely put the background out of focus and turn it into a black abyss.
This second photo, titled Lafayette’s Song, makes more use out of the one-sided studio lighting. Similar to the photo of Lafayette above, her dark colors fade into the background allowing the white of her chest and the orange of her face to pop in the photo. This is aided by the fact that her body was slightly turned toward the umbrellas and floods. This image also features an digital extension of the black backdrop that I added in post to emphasize the emptiness above Laffy. It’s not too much, but I liked the framing better by containing the subject entirely to the bottom half of the frame.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, Laffy is one of my favorite photography subjects and I’m sure she’ll be featured again. This has been a delightful exercise in lighting and utilizing post processing to enhance an image. I once read that a bad photo can’t be saved in the edit, but an edit can certainly improve a photo, and I’d like to think that I’ve shown how that’s true in this short case study.
what song is Laffy singing?