There's a Tiger on the Loose

Last year's 366 Snaps photo for May 14, in color. The treatment's the same but the crop's slightly different, for reasons I no longer recall....

This cat lives with our next-door neighbors, occasionally indoors but mostly not. It has a name, but we've forgot and call it Tiger. Tiger's just awesome--smart, ferocious, and attractive--but is not welcome in our yard. Not that it keeps him out. He therefore appears from time to time in this photo stream. This--another 366 Snaps photo--is my favorite. (And here he is again!).

I used Photoshop Elements' Spotlight lighting effect filter to emphasize what was already fortunately-arranged light, here.

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"It turns out," I mentioned on April 30, "that a 300 mm lens is a poor choice for cat portraiture." This was still true on the 14th, when I took a half-dozen photographs of Tiger as he reluctantly left the yard. None were framed really well and two were poorly focused. Ignoring the focal length issues, this old lens is too slow and too heavy to capture a moving cat unless he's quite far off.

Long lenses are an extreme case. They're good for bringing distant objects close. They're good for action shots when the action's predictable. But they're not good for everyday photography.

This is obvious. What's less obvious is that the lesson applies to all cameras and all lenses. There are things even poor cameras do well, and there are things even excellent camera/lens combinations don't do well.

After you've sorted out the camera's controls you set about finding its strengths and weaknesses. And this, more than anything, is why I changed cameras every month for 366 Snaps--each opens a different window on the world.

The 300 mm, much as I like it, offers a pretty constricted view.

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This photograph is an outtake--actually, an alternate version--from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps.

Number of project photos taken: 108
Title of "roll:" Birds, and a Tiger
Other photos taken on 5/14/2012: The Daily Flower Census reveals that our garden was blue a year ago--Irises and Columbines, mostly. In the afternoon and evening I was wandering the yard taking random photographs--the date stamps show at least three sessions.