The Making of: Takashi

Remember the photo of Mizuki the cat I talked about earlier? Takashi is her “brother”. Compared to his “sister”, Takashi is very hyper. Because of this, it was real hard to get him in focus in a lot of the shots I took of him. The owner said although he’s only a year old, he is usually more calm than when I was there. Maybe he was excited to meet me. Anyway, after taking many, many shots of the cats, Takashi finally calmed down to get this photo and a few others completely in focus. Most of the photos before this one were just too blurry and didn’t look good at all. I love how this photo says, “Can I go play now? Are you done taking pictures?”

To achieve this look, the background was a tannish wall with a tungsten lamp next to the wall for added light. The only other light was from outside. It was about 9am when I took it so the light from outside was strong and bright. I like using natural light on pets because it looks best with the colors and I don’t have to worry about a flash causing harsh-looking shadows or eye glow.

I didn’t do much to the photo in post but I did work on the eyes a little. As the cat wasn’t facing the light directly head-on, one of the eyes looked too dark so I lightened it by selecting it in Adobe Camera RAW. Since I changed that eye, I decided to brighten the blue on both of them as well. The only other thing I did was change the color balance a bit. The original photo was a little too red. I added some yellow, making the colors look more natural. I think my color balance on the camera was set on custom.