Learned a lesson: taking a picture of your cats is a pain. After several attempts of various staged poses, I decided to go with a more natural portrait.
PP:
curves
b&w
masked out the eyes
selective color
cloned out spots in background
hue and saturation
resize
usm x2
save for web
Statistics
Place: 119 out of 261 Avg (all users): 5.6619 Avg (commenters): 6.4000 Avg (participants): 5.4513 Avg (non-participants): 5.9072 Views since voting: 911 Views during voting: 343 Votes: 210 Comments: 8 Favorites: 1 (view)
This is really cool, I love the selective desat, really awesome tones, great lighting as well, really nice work with this one, probably wouldve scored it a 7 or 8 had I voted on it.
First Impressions: Cute kitty. Nice range of tones from black to white, though some of the highlights seem a little too bright (but I have the same trouble with my cat, too). Love the alert expression and pose. Nothing out of the ordinary here to make this shot stand out from the other cats in the challenge except the selective coloring, which I feel might be a tad overdone (and personally, isn't my favorite method of processing).
After reading your comments: I agree. Taking a picture of the cats is a pain! I'm glad you went with a natural pose, I like it. I wonder if perhaps you could have not gone quite as far with the curves to keep the contrast down a bit? Nice small aperture for a shallow dof, and you handled the focus nicely. And you did this with a shutter speed of 1/25? Wow. You must have the most patient cat in the world! It seems like you might have been shooting in pretty dim conditions looking at the combination of camera settings you have listed. Perhaps finding a location with more light would have allowed you more flexibility, and made the photo even sharper?
To grow the vote for next time: I think pet portraits are tough. Everyone wants to enter, and it's hard to be creative and stand out without making your poor pet look completely foolish. I think you did a nice job with this one, and for the most part the voters seemed to agree. It probably just lacked that little extra to make it stand out since voters are flipping through seeing cat, cat, dog, cat, dog, dog, cat... Perhaps thinking more about creative lighting setups, or a more unique composition would help for next time.
Hope this has been helpful. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions about the critique. Good luck in your future challenges!
Normally I really like selective desaturation, but I think I might've toned down the eyes just a little bit, they really pop, might've liked to see the color version of this too. Just my 2 cents, still a very cute photo :)
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