Kitten photos advice

[Jitetsu]

Have recently moved into my first house, dug some of my first garden and got our first pets. We've got an incredibly friendly tabby kitten who thinks my shoulder is the natural position for a kitten and we've got a shy and fluffly, entirely black, kitten.

I took a few of the tabby (we got it first) with my 50mm (no flash) with some success. The black one will pose a few more problems in that it's shy and it'll confuse the exposure.

So i'm wondering, what kind of length would you be using, would you use a flash and what advice can you offer for producing lovely shots.

My gut tells me, 50-100mm, continuous focus if they're moving, big aperture / shallowish DOF to keep kitten in focus but pleasing bokeh and mean good indoor light without a flash. So probably use my 50mm f/1.4 and maybe use the 1.4x with it for a bit more zoom. Also, I could have someone using a fluffy thing on a stick to get some action shots but without people in them.

thanks in advance.

Edit: Of course then i try and mount my 50mm onto my new 1.4x and notice just in time that there's glass getting in the way of glass.. which jogs the memory about it only working with Canon L lenses. D'oh.

[T0MAT01]

I guess 50mm seems quite short on a 5D when you're taking kitten shots, so depending on available light (I wouldn't use flash if you can help it) you could try the 70-200 f/4 but you'll probably have to up the ISO quite a bit to get a reasonable shutter speed - you'll need something like 1/200th to stop motion blur.

If you can't get the shutter speed then it'll have to be the 50mm and a fairly hefty crop!

As for metering for the black one, I'd try spot metering on the fur and underexposing by at least a stop, then see how it looks on the LCD and fine tune from there, then put those settings into manual mode and as long as the lighting doesn't change and the kitten stays out of any shadows you should be laughing!

HTH.

[onefivenine]

We have cats and they're very tricky to photograph.

Every time I used on-camera flash I'd get the horrible burned out yellow-eye (feline equivalent of human red-eye), so unless you can get the flash off-camera I'd suggest not using it. (Unless it's shots with their eyes shut!)

Last night I grabbed this shot in ambient light in the living room while watching Scream 2.
ISO3200, f/2.8, 70mm, 1/80s, no flash.

Here's one from a while ago with flash.
50mm, f/3.2, 1/250s, ISO100, off-camera flash to camera right.

Another one in which I used off-camera flash camera left trying to give Tigger a moody look.
50mm, f/3.2, 1/250s, ISO100, off camera flash.

If all else fails, try outdoors in daylight, and a long zoom can help avoid distracting them - mine have a tendency to run straight at the camera if they see me with it.
200mm, f/3.5, 1/30s, ISO400.

Good luck!

[Luffy]

Here's one of "Omo" shot a few years ago on a G5 as far as I remember I just took a reading from his fur and shot away

[salubrious_k]

I went round a friends house last week who had just got a kitten. And all I can say is that it was damn difficult getting a decent shot. I took about 50 and will only use 4 or 5. I was using off-camera flash, I found that the best, but still almost all of my shots were out of focus as it was moving just too fast (and I wanted a shallow DOF so as not to get any of the carpet texture in focus)