I needed to get this week’s entry done in a hurry, and after playing around with a few different subjects I ultimately settled on our cat, Ninja. I played around with her for a while to get something a bit different from your standard animal portrait, and pretty soon both her patience and the camera’s battery pack ran out.
Fortunately I still got a shot I liked.
I got down on the floor to shoot this one, but still bounced the flash off the ceiling. I converted the shot to B&W to get rid of a distracting object in the background. See that rectangular thing just above her head? It’s actually a bright, green and white plastic Leapster pad my daughter plays with. I had to move around quite a bit so I quickly lost track of the background, but I’m still happy with the result.
I shot in RAW and did my editing in Lightroom. In addition to the B&W conversion, I did a crop, then deepened the blacks to get her pupils nice and glossy and upped the clarity to bring out her fur.
And there we have it. Now I best get back to work on The Pack: Lie with the Dead.
About Mike Oliveri
Mike Oliveri is a writer, martial artist, cigar aficionado, motorcyclist, and family man, but not necessarily in that order. He is currently hard at work on the werewolf noir series The Pack for Evileye Books.