Damien communicates with the mothership
I tend to fire off dozens of photographs at a time and then evaluate them solely by thumbnails. As a result, I often don’t notice oddball images like the one above, taken when Damien was about eight weeks old. Directly above his face, just out of the shot, is a two-bulb fluorescent desklamp of the kind once used by draughtsmen (I got it from work when they shut down our ink-and-paper drafting operations), but with modern warm fluorescent bulbs. This light frequently confuses automatic exposure controls, which seldom get the white balance right for it. I take a lot of very yellow pictures under this light.
The cats are oddly fascinated by it. Charlotte in particular — who experiences the world largely through her nose — greets this lamp by starting at one end and smelling carefully down its entire length. And sometimes all the way back up again. I suspect it smells like delicious houseflies.
March 27, 2007 — 5:54 am
Comments: 4
Nineteen white, fuzzy cat bellies
It felt like Spring yesterday, which compelled Charlotte to leap out the back door, fall to the ground and wave her stuff around in the air. This is the tragic consequence of teaching your cat that her white, fuzzy belly is the most beautiful object in the whole wide world.
This was not at all the image I was originally going for. I was headed for a straight-up montage of cat belly photographs. But because she’s black and white, Charlotte is an especially strange and wonderful object to play with in Photoshop.
When you ctrl-click on an image layer, Photoshop automatically selects the brightest portions of the layer. So I did that and made a mask of the white parts and saved it, then I inverted the image and made a mask of the black parts and saved it. This theoretically gave me a combined mask that would cut around the outlines of Charlotte and save me the trouble of manually erasing or blending the backgrounds (on account of, I am lazy), since the background is largely gray. But, of course, the darkest part of the white fur and the lightest part of the black fur are gray, too, so when I subtracted the mask from the photo, this was what I got. Well, after some fussing.
It looks like one of those old masters drawings. The ones on gray paper with the ink and chalk. I tried adding a paper texture, which looked cool but not cool enough to justify tripling the file size. To be economical, .gif files rely on large areas of totally solid color.
Please enjoy my cat’s white, fuzzy belly nineteen different ways. She would want you to.
March 14, 2007 — 8:09 am
Comments: 3