FuFu Illustrates the Four Classial Lighting Patterns

I am one week into a 10-week course "Introduction to Lighting Techniques" at ICP.  Our assignment for the first week is to take a photo of each of the four classical lighting patterns: split, loop, Rembrandt and glamour/butterfly. If you are interested you can learn more about these patterns here. On that webpage they are illustrated by a kind of goofy looking actor.  Actually, I think it might be a mannequin.  Regardless, I find it kind of creepy and prefer FuFu's modelling below!  Conventionally these are meant to be lighting patterns for human portraits but JoJo was not as willing a model as FuFu, so you have to make do with what you've got.  If you have lemons, make lemonade.  If you have a cat, make cat portraits.

I couldn't decide between two potential Rembrandt shots, so I include them both, one stationary and one "action" shot:

And here, of course, is a split lighting pattern:

Loop and glamor are kind of similar, and with cats the shadow on the nose which is the telltale sign of which pattern is in play is not as visible.  Anyway, I am calling this one loop lighting:

And rounding out the classical 4 we have glamor / beauty / butterfly / Hollywood:

Our instructor also added a semi-official 5th pattern, "monster" lighting.  Here, instead of re-inventing the wheel I instantly knew I had the purr-fect example of this lighting effect from the AMACA2Cs archive, which long-time faithful followers surely will remember as it is an image that is difficult to forget!

JoJo Pursues a Master's Degree in FuPhotography

Lately when I've been working late or otherwise not home JoJo has been sending me pics of the cats to amuse me / torture me / beckon me home. Its just so easy with the iPhone, a multi-generation upgrade from her camera-less Palm monstrosity. And the pics are quite good! Now, in the previous post I gave a rather outlandish example of some "artistic" processing you can do with the iPhone, and I promise more grungtastic, hyper-processed iPhone cat photos in the future, but for now these are two of JoJo's straight out of the camera pics. Isn't strange / cool how FuFu doesn't appear to have pupils in the first one? And the second one, I don't know if it is because she is covering one of his ears but it looks sort of like a human face / expression.........

FuFu gets the Andy Warhol treatment - all via the iPhone...

Whoaa, this iPhone thing is huge! I took an iPhone photography workshop at ICP this past weekend with Dan Burkholder that was excellent! It is truly amazing what you can do on the iPhone with $20 worth of apps, in some (many) ways it is better than Photoshop ($600), and certainly more user friendly. It would have taken me ages to compose this "pop art" rendition of FuFu in Photoshop, yet this was a relative snap on the iPhone using PhotoWizard and PhotoForge apps. I'm almost tempted to port over some of my pics taken from my "real" camera to the iPhone for processing, but what I really need to do is start taking more photos via on the iPhone. There is kind of a cool purity to taking the photo and processing it all on the phone!

For those of you interested, Dan has an article in the winter issue (#13) of Peterson's Photographic that is on newsstands now that covers the gist of what he covered in the workshop. Also, he has mini-tutorials and such on his website as well.

Stay tuned for more iPhone cat photos here at AMACA2Cs, but don't expect me to use it for the majority of my pics, as my "big kahuna" DSLR is still the best choice for capturing a moving cat!

Hello Sudan!

FuFu "hunting" a bird...........below you can see the end result! (Excuse the blur, cats & birds move fast when doing this kind of dance....) It is always interesting to see the breakdown by country of "hits" to AMACA2Cs from Blogger's analytics. And this week, a new country showed up: Sudan! So I would like to extend a warm AMACA2Cs welcome to our viewer from Sudan. Ain't the internet great? Maybe I will divulge some more international stats in future posts, but suffice it to say that outside of the US which is still the vast majority of our clicks, Europe and Japan constitute the "core" international fan base, so its always interesting when Southern Hemisphere countries show up. It is too bad that Blogger only ranks the top 10 countries, as it would be interesting if they showed all the countries that have ever clicked, so I could track our progress towards getting the whole world to take a peak at AMACA2Cs. Anyways, here is the culmination of FuFu's stalking!