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Sometimes when things go wrong, they just work

May 30, 2010
Uncategorized

I’ve been getting in to photography over the winter spending a lot of time understanding all the theory about focal lengths, apertures, shutter speeds, ISO, depth of field, hyper focal distances and all the rest of the technical side. Its been quite interesting but more so when put in to practice.

I’ve had a few successes which I might put up but many failure. Most of the failures were caused by forgetting to change something like the aperture and ending up over exposing. Most of these can be recovered by shooting in RAW format and using programmes like Adobe Lightroom. Just occasionally, though, the failed picture just works.

I read a magazine article on photographing animals that all you can do with cats is follow them round and hope to get a good shot. I was following our female cat, Sadie, one day and she wasn’t having any of it. One thing you must do with portraits is focus on the eyes so I set the auto focus on my 70-300mm lens and pointed. Unfortunately because I had to be quick I missed the eyes. The other setting meant that I had a very shallow depth of field and this was the result:

5 Comments
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5 Comments

  1. Richard  •  May 30, 2010 @3:57 pm

    That is a stunning photograph. Error or not, it’s a keeper.

  2. TGS  •  May 30, 2010 @4:34 pm

    Thanks, Richard.

    I should have said I only used Lightroom to convert the RAW file and Photoshop Elements to reduce the size. Other than that it is “as taken”.

  3. Span Ows  •  May 30, 2010 @7:19 pm

    focus or not that cat is looking daggers at you!…cats do not like attention UNLESS they look for it.
    Span Ows´s last blog ..Old Oxfordian overseers II… My ComLuv Profile

  4. Longrider  •  May 31, 2010 @2:12 pm

    Following them around is the only way to get good pictures of cats. A long lens and autofocus for the eyes helps. You get a lot of duds, but a few decent shots that make people think you are almost not bad ;)

    This one worked well – just let people think you planned it that way.
    Longrider´s last blog ..Light Blogging My ComLuv Profile

  5. Mark Wadsworth  •  Jun 1, 2010 @12:52 pm

    If it’s good enough for Longrider, then it’s good enough for me.

    Cats and flowers. You can’t really go wrong, can you?
    Mark Wadsworth´s last blog ..Will Hutton: Update My ComLuv Profile