[Update: We renamed this cat “Beezle” (includes video of him playing).]
I was going to blog about the President’s speech, but look! Kitty pictures.
Taking all these pictures of Hotch is proving to be more difficult than I expected. For one thing, the color balance is all over the place. The room is actually lit with incandescent light, which gives everything a warm glow, but of course the flash on the camera is daylight white. So while the colors in the camera images are probably accurate, it’s not matching what I saw when I was there, so I’ve been making some adjustments, and the results havn’t been very consistent.
The problem is that the camera is guessing one color balance and then I’m making rough adjustments to that guess, so the variance is accumulating. I should probably get out the grey card and switch to raw mode.
As you can see, Hotch thinks my iPhone case makes a great chew toy. Too bad the iPhone’s still in it.
The other problem with taking pictures of Hotch is that my focus technique doesn’t work very well. With the kinds of photograpy I usually do, I’ve found it works better when I disable the automatic auto-focus on the shutter button, so when I want to take a picture, I pick the object I want in focus, press the manual focus button, and then recompose the picture and press the shutter button. Now I can take as many pictures as I want at that distance, without the auto-focus deciding to do something different.
The problem is that Hotch moves so fast sometimes that between the time I press the focus button and the time I press the shutter, he’s moved away from the focus distance. I’ve taken thousands of photos this way — weddings, children, flowers, buildings, even marathon runners — and it works just fine, so I wasn’t expecting a problem, and it took me a while to recognize what was happening, because the camera’s LCD screen is too small to show the problem unless I know to look for it.
Still, I got a few nice ones.
More to come in a few days.
He is adorable!