nicholas caturday

Nicholas is ten months old this May. He’s grown bigger overall than both of the girls, and is as long as Beau, but not as beefy. He’s still the skinny neighborhood kid of a cat, running around and running everybody else a bit ragged. When he wants to hide from everyone he’s made mad that day, he tends to find a spot under one of the deck pieces of furniture, like this one. It’s not that the other cats are vengefully trying to hunt him down, it’s just that Nicholas instinctively seems to know when he should literally lay low for a while. Everybody calms down and then Nicholas reappears.

Nicholas is the last of the “babies.” Pretty soon he’ll pass his first year of life, and then he’ll begin to mellow and calm down even more. I’ve already watched it happen to the first two generations, now I get to watch it happen with Nick.

cats, lighting and micro four thirds

I’ve noted many times before on this blog that Luke has many favorite resting spots around the house. An almost infinite number, one might say. When he gets bored he goes hunting for never-before-used spots, like here. This clean spot on the kitchen table had a pair of folded towels that Luke immediately took an interest in. Luke does love his soft spots. He settled down with his fore paws stretched out in the sunbeam coming through the kitchen window. For added dramatic effect he crossed his paws, settling down with his eyes closed to enjoy the afternoon warmth on his paws.

This photo is a JPEG straight out of the GH4. I have the color and exposure tuned to provide less luminance and color contrast in-camera. The GH4 has an exposure curve just like the one in the Olympus E-M5 and Pen F, and it’s set to the same values as in both Olympus cameras.

Now the nit-noids are going to complain that the shadows are too dark and the highlights too overexposed. I don’t care. This is how I saw the scene. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit in front of a computer screen playing with Lightroom trying to “balance” the highlight and shadow areas. I’m happy with the way it came out of the camera.

Now another straight-out-of-the-GH4 JPEG. I showed this in one of the last posts, King of the House, but I’d broken down and actually edited the RAW file in Lightroom and published the result.

I wish now I’d published this version instead of the edited one. The eyes in particular are well emphasized. The overall tones are lighter and brighter, an effect that the GH4 produced. When they talk about color science in a camera, it’s true science developed by scientists and engineers who are well versed in the art. Me, I’m just an amateur who knows just enough to be dangerous.