Kitty Cat Diary - 2006

I've written about the complexities of black & white conversion in digital photography before, and this is a good example here. The red channel is key for black & white portraits, because it controls so much of the skin tone--knowing what to do with the red channel will get you a porcelain-like radiance (simply jacking up the curves, contrast, brightness..etc will not get you that look--it'll just degrade the image quality drastically, and it's one of the most common mistakes that inexperienced digital photographers make). You can also get similar results by having two Hue/Saturation mask layers, with the top one set to no saturation at all, and the bottom one is the one you tweak (the hue)--you can also add one more Levels mask layer at the very top to do some more fine tweaking, but be careful with that because that's when people go overboard and degrade the image too much. This type of look will probably blow out some highlights, which isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on the subject. For casual shooting of cute females and babies, it probably will look fine, but that same approach won't work for something like war journalism photography, where massive detail in the middle values are extremely important for that gritty "hyper reality" look).

For some of the photos in this batch I used a silver reflector, and for some I used fill flash, but you probably can't tell which is which from just looking, unless you know how to spot color temperature shifts in the secondary light source based from the reflections on her skin.

 

Um... no, I really have no idea what possessed Kitty Cat to pick up a pair of er...toe gloves.

 

Kitty Cat fawning over Donovan with my mom.

 

Kitty Cat holding Donovan (my brother Dennis's first baby) at the hospital.

 

Kitty Cat trying on a new top. She's been into what we nicknamed "boobie shirts" lately--shirts that are low-cut and meant to expose some soft flesh. I'm the opposite of most men--I don't get all bent out of shape if my woman shows some skin--in fact I encourge her to be as bold as she can comfortably handle. One time I sort of shot myself in the foot though, because I picked out these super short skirts for her, and realized they were just a little too short when we were riding up the escalator at the mall one day. I think my face was burning hotter than hers though.