The first day I really have a chance to choose a subject to photograph, so what do I choose? A cat of course!

I know some "real" photographers will roll their eyes to that, but I don't care. It's a live model that I don't have to worry about model releases and don't need to feel embarrassed if I have to stop and look up something before taking any shots.

And what do you know... I did have some trouble. This is a failed first shot. I loved the composition, but I couldn't figure out how to get the camera to stop focusing on the leaves and look at the cat!

I say failed shot because the camera wasn't doing what I wanted. I was trying to get the leaves to be blurred out foreground decoration that could provide some depth and create the feeling of capturing a animal out in the wild. (It is a stray cat by the way.) But on second look, the image may very well still capture the feeling I was trying to get, and leaving the cat blurred out makes it even more mysterious. Something that only works because I knew I'd have more chances to try again because it's a stray cat knows it can come to our door for food.

Later that night I saw a perfect opportunity to try to test out the camera's max sensor sensitivity. One of my original goals for buying my DSLR was to do night shots, so I cranked up the ISO setting to 12800 and took this pic.

(Oh, in the span of one day, I already moved away from using the Auto setting and went straight to manual. I knew that if I was going to use a $15,000 device, I was going to really use it. That and that's what Brian Peterson said to do in Understanding Exposure.)

Does this follow the rule of thirds? I don't know. I'd say the image is split in half between light and dark, which is fitting because we've named this cat Two-Face. What I really know is that I aimed for the cat dead center, liked the shadows, and shot. I once again missed focusing where I intended, but ended up liking how being out of focus makes her look like she's a living shadow.

And here she is, Two-Face the Cat.

She patiently waits for food., comfortable enough with us to eat from our hands if we present her some, but she won't let us touch her, and she needs to know she has an escape path.

She's backlit, which isn't the ideal lighting for a typical portrait as far as I know, but once again I like the effect. Mystery is a cat's best friend and the backlighting is just the beginning of that effect. The color of her fur creates the impression of darker shadows than there really are, enhanced by the shimmer off the wood, and light and dark sides of the image once again mirror the light and dark coloring to her fur. To top it off, the diagonal lines give a nice contrast the curves of her body and, most importantly, to the horizontal line that divides her face.

Here's a zoomed in look at her face, taking advantage of my 18-135mm lens. She'll never be tamed, but as long as she's comfortable enough to pose for photographs, I can be happy with that. Maybe it's an amateur thing to do, but I think she's a fantastic subject to photograph.

So far all of these photographs have been untouched and uncropped. But since I didn't know what size to save my images at, I had set the camera to save the largest RAW and JPG files it could, so now was the perfect time to try some cropping. The image of an eye is stereotypical, but now I finally have the technology to do it myself, so I'm going to do it. And it's one beautiful eye if I have to say so myself.