Sidewalk

For a while now, I have wanted to take pictures of 30th Street, the street I live on. It is a fantastic street full of shops, cute houses, and more beer varieties than just about any street in the country.

Today, Ryan and I walked down 30th Street (as well as some adjacent streets) to try to take pictures responding to the some of the photo challenges from photochallenge.com: Simple, Control, Shadow, Road, and Sidewalk.

This was the best of many shots I took of sidewalks, but... something is not quite right. I like the lolling cat in the foreground, highlighting the lazy inactivity of the sidewalk. I also like the sidewalk receding into the plants and trees in the background, with the endless, wavelike shadows of the powerlines. But the vast, middle is a bit distracting. Perhaps I should have stepped back a bit so that the cat was further into the picture and away from the borders. This would have given me more room to crop. Photography is a tricky business.

Photogenicity - in the Wiktionary if not the Dictionary

I am a firm believer in the theory of photogenicity. I know that I have never looked my best in photos (other people have confirmed this for me.) My theory has always been that my features are not quite defined enough and so the camera simply records a fleshy blob instead of my face. Perhaps it is speciesist of me, but I never thought that animals would have this same problem. I have found, however, that in the three years since I have lived with cats, that some of them have their likenesses taken much easier than do others.

Tiberius for example, looks lovely in almost every photo even with a modest camera, mediocre lighting, and no retouching (as you can see). His typical tabby pattern and color and matte coat absorb the light perfectly making him look even better in the photo than he does in reality.

Buggie however, though her fluffy gray fur comes out well, has facial features that come out strangely in photos. This baffles me because she is probably (and this viewpoint is completely and utterly unbiased) the prettiest cat ever.

Now Dickens, who is also almost unbearably handsome, looks like a shiny black smudge in photographs. He is too black and too sleek and the light just bounces off of him.

Last night I was determined to take photographs of my pets that capture their beauty so I used a clip-on flash (Nikon Speedlight SB-600) to bounce the flash off of the walls, ceilings, bookcases, and anything else I could point the light at, to try create the right conditions to capture the perfect shot.




Two shots of Buggie. I didn't have enough light in the first picture, but at least she looks like herself.

The second shot is a profile view in which the viewer can appreciate her fluffiness and adorableness.








I only achieved success on one shot of Dickens, but even one is miraculous. He still isn't as handsome in the picture as he is in real life, but at least he is not a shiny black blob.


I'll have to practice more with the clip-on flash. I still have no idea what I'm doing. But I'm looking forward to more picture of my cats pretending to be photogenic!