An entry in the Cute category

I’m constantly on the look out for interesting photos – especially if I think they may sell, and so I practiced my flash techniques on our bengal cats yesterday. I use a white cloth backdrop lit by two flash guns, have a third gun in a silvered umbrella facing the subject from the right, and have a silver reflector held to the left to send light back onto the shadowed side of the subject. For these photos, the cat was sitting on a white piece of chipboard fixed to a stool. I use Canon 550 and 580 flash guns (bought from ebay), and the Canon ST-E2 wireless controller, but use all the flashguns set to manual as the exposure is not going to change once I have the environment in place. I try to set the backdrop flashes to just blow out the white so that there are no details visible (which needed 1/8th power on the guns) and then set the exposure on the main gun to properly illuminate the subject (this one was 1/2 power). With this approach you get a fully isolated subject where the background is pure white and you can easily select and remove the background to paste into a new location. The pictures below are the before and after shots of the kitten waiting for Santa! By the way, if you want to see more of these cats in action, check out the YouTube video of our Bengal kittens in action!

Isolation of bengal cat against white background

Waiting for Santa