PHOTOGRAPHY: SECOND THOUGHTS

One of my favourites pictures from yesterday's post was of the two cats on the stairs. However, I realised it could be improved by cropping it even more, but from the right, to remove the stairness of the stairs. Doing this removes the perspective of ascending height to create a series of flat levels.

Here's the original version and below the slightly more cropped version.

I think this is much more eye-catching because it removes the obvious context.

PHOTOGRAPHY: TAKING BAD PICTURES

I take a lot of photographs but I wouldn't dare call myself a photographer. Hell, I'm not really interested in photography as a hobby, though I can appreciate it as an art and as a skill, the aesthetic aspect of it. What I do is take snaps. Of cats. And any other animal I encounter along the way too. But as someone who spends a fair chunk of his time involved in cat rescuing, what I photograph is cats.

I do this for two reasons. I just like looking at cats and at images (still or moving, whatever) of cats. I want to keep a photographic record of all the cats we're involved in helping. I don't keep notes on them all, I just take snaps.

Taking a decent, or even a less than mediocre, photo of a cat is a hard thing to do because they can be constantly in motion and even when seeming relaxed or asleep, they can be moving in a fraction of a second. It's even harder as I take many pictures in small areas such as cages and from awkward angles, where it's impossible to achieve anything remotely aesthetically pleasing. 

Today, however, I actually managed to take something I consider the best cat photograph I have ever taken. I'd picked up and brought a couple of cats over to Carol who looks after our rescued cats. As usual, I stopped to chat and make a fuss of any kittens she was keeping in the house and of the various cats, some permanent, some up for re-homing, and she has quite a few of them. Her house is also immaculately clean, predominantly white with some wood grain lino for contrast. I didn't have a lot of time but there were no distractions so I took the opportunity to try for some more considered shots than usual. Below are a handful of my favourites. I've done some cropping with Picassa but that's all; indeed I'm not capable of much more than that when it comes to altering photographs. Maybe I should look round for an evening class sometime.

I deliberately tried to get a triangular shape for this one. It would be better if the tails were all in shot.

Using some judicious cropping, I've managed to get this lovely friendly little girl in the focus of a narrow frame.

I like this one for the vertical frame and how the animals are all at different heights and with lots of long straight lines. Stop me if I'm being pretentious.

 

Only a small thin crop down the left hand side here. A cat on every step would have been wonderful. And impossible.

Saving the best till last, I love the sheer simplicity of this. Unlike the others, there is not the smallest extraneous detail. Just the cat and the lino.

I'm putting all these and a few more minus text up on my cat rescuing blog.

TECHNOLOGY: Lumix DMC-FP8EB Digital Camera Red

An Amazon 5-star review, expanded.

A short review for people who just want a point and click camera-

-like me.

For the last several weeks I've been intermittently reading reviews looking for a new decent and relatively simple to use point and click camera when I came across this in the latest Which? Magazine as the best buy in its category so it seemed a good bet.

Actually, what I really wanted was to replace my old camera which seemed unable to compensate for the fact that I'm lousy at taking photographs as anyone who looks at my cat rescuing blog will attest. I wanted a camera which will ignore the fact my hand was unsteady and produce a perfect picture every time. Ideally it would also hypnotise a cat into not moving while I was taking its picture.

Apart from a case and a memory card which I ordered separately at the same time, it came with all the essentials. The camera was £142.00, add on another eighteen quid for an 8Gb memory card and carrying case and it ends up on the affordable if a bit pricy side for a pocket point and click camera. 

The short manual is quite clear though I went through it slowly and carefully -I had to, I'm an idiot when it comes to reading manuals properly. The first thing is to charge up the lithium battery which takes a couple of hours. After that I had to set up the date and time which was quite simple. Then I wanted to set up the automatic function which needed a little care but wasn't hard. If you want to know how the record and personal functions work you'll have to wait for another review though the instructions are quite clear.

So, setup done I took a few snaps also using the zoom function and the results look pretty good. You can download them to your pc either directly from the camera (all connections included) or, if you have the card slots, use the memory card. There's no viewfinder which means you have to use the screen but then that's what I did on my previous camera and the screen is a good size.

A more detailed manual  with dozens of different settings for all kinds of pictures and including HD video (it says) is included on a CD-ROM. Because it's larger onscreen it's correspondingly easier to read and follow. I had to discover that to open it I needed to right-click on the icon and open it up with Acrobat PDF reader. Left-click and it fills Wordpad with gibberish. Editing software -PHOTOfunSTUDIO 4.0- is also included but I'm sticking with Picassa for the moment.

It's compact and smart, easy to use, good results. Unsurprisingly it looks like Which? got it right. This is a good one. 

Of course I then had to tell Susan that I'd spent a hundred and forty quid on a new camera without telling her. This is her asking me why I needed a new camera.

Because, darling, I said, I bought it for Animal Krackers so I can take better photos of the cats and dogs and whatevers we rescue and put up on websites and my blog.

And this is what she thought of that.

But here is a wonderful photograph of our Lily. Not a hint of camera shake and she didn't even move a whisker.

Yep, good camera.

TAKEN THIS MORNING AS THE SNOW KEEPS A'FALLING