Black cat with a light background

I often come into the situation that I want to photograph my black cat with a

light background, but of course I want to see the cat + the colors and forms

of the background on the picture. When I focus on her (and she has her eyes

open, because with her eyes closed it looks like a black ball or something)

(and I even get to the point where my camera is able to focus on her *sigh*)

she turns too dark and the background too light. It is a pity and I want to

know what I can do about that.

 

So, does anyone have any tips?

I assume that you're using natural light for this - it's an exposure rather than a lighting question so I'm moving it to another forum.

 

If you're relying on your camera to work out the exposure for you then you need to know that the camera doesn't know your cat is black, and tries to photograph her as a medium grey, in other words a shade that reflects 18% of the light that falls on her, instead of the 5-10% (guess) that actually reflects from her.

 

The answer is either to use an incident light meter to get an accurate reading, or to measure the light reflected from a grey card and set that exposure on your camera

Is this color or black and white? Film or digital? There are different ways to handle this depending on how you are trying to capture the scene.

 

- Randy

It is color, and digital.

You should be able to control the midtones and contrast in Photoshop, or by using a shoe mounted flash. Set the camera to 1 to 2 stops underexposure and set the flash to 1 to 2 stops overexposure.This will balance out the foreground to background difference in lighting. If you can shoot raw and do this , its a piece of cake.

Good advice above. My $0.02 is that I would try to reduce the contrast so that the sensor can effectively encompass both the highlights and the dark cat. Best try is to ensure the light background area isn't in sunlight, but rather overcast or heavy shade and use a fill flash for the cat. It took me a while to work this out with my wife's cat.

Thank you for all the ideas. Too bad photography is an expensive hobby, and monthly if I put everything aside and don't buy anything except the necessary stuff I would have about 30-40 euros left a month, and I don't have time for a job. (I don't even have time for photography, so let alone a job) So it takes a very long while before I'm able to buy anything...and now the in built flash stopped working properly so that's real nice too. Not that an in built flash works properly anyway, but it's better than nothing. :P

 

Sorry, just had to whine over that for a minute. Money is always in the way.