Trying to convey how the cat hurries and tries to show himself as litle as possible in the sunlight, then takes his time once he hits the shadows.
This really is a stray cat, complete with great big patches of missing fur from various fights he's been in. He's been in the neighborhood for years and won't hesitate to beg for food from anyone, though he won't get very close to people. He just sits and yowls at you and stares meaningfully at where he thinks the food is.
Handheld (he just happened to come by when I was shooting something else) so some alignment of images was necessary. I used the paint chip missing below the siding on the house as my alignment point. Zoom was at 75mm for all shots and f/8, ISO 200; speed varied slightly as I was shooting in aperture-priority mode.
Tried to get pre-validation from the overworked SC but so far no luck, and I've decided I don't like the B&W version so I'm doing a slight re-process. If the processing was legal before then so is this version, so what the hey. We're all learning from this one.
PP - converted all from RAW with same parameters (set color temperature, saturation, sharpness and exposure compensation). Started with last image as my base. Layered them one at a time starting with the next-to-last and going backwards in time, aligning the image on the paint chip at 50% transparency, then changing blend to "if darker" and 5-20% transparency and masking out pretty much everything but the cat and his shadow from each layer. Left a couple out of the sequence due to too much overlap IMO. Dodged a bit on the base layer so the cat was darker than the grass in the few places it wasn't. Burnt kitty in a few places. Cloned some lighter grass onto the shadow of the wooden wall by the corner where it overlapped the cat. Merged layers.
Cropped. Increased saturation and contrast. Burnt and blurred license plate. Colored red bud on plant same color as rest of plant. Desaturated cyan/blue range. Added border, resized, sharpened. Cloned lighter paint color onto missing paint chip to de-emphasize it, cloned out light branch sticking up against the black drain tube and burnt metal rod on trash can.
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Love the title of this shot, it really sets a story. If you look at the 'two' cats on the left you are able to see the grass through them, so that could be an improving point. :)
Weird the two cats on the right are showing a bit of green fur. I like how you have the cats spaced on the left, not so much how they are touching each other on the right.
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