Whiskers and fur, critter close-ups! #Monomad

Now this is something that I've wanted to do for a while!

This should be Marigold, but I'm not sure, they were all moving a lot while I was crawling around, poking that old Nikon macro zoom lens into their faces!

I've noticed for a while that their whiskers are perfect as the main area of focus, so why not really focus on that?

Now, how do I get those whiskers tack sharp on even kittens that move around constantly?

Well that old Nikon D700 with the 35-105 macro zoom makes that choice easy: there is no autofocus, and no time to use the cross screen, so I just had to wing it. Which means using the matte screen as it is, and simply moving my head & camera to be able to focus rapidly that way :-)

Old tricks that I learn decades ago, but it took me until now to really test that out with a digital camera!

What about editing these? That too is all simple, using Pinta to whack levels, curves and sharpness hard. This one would have been better dragging it through the extended, pixel perfect process that I used to have, but still it works as is, especially since the teeth are the main focus area.

But what about their fur? As well as other features?

Well that old zoom totally delivers!

What about movement? Now that I'm doing this with no cost and next to no work on a laptop, why not just do a lot of exposures?

Working with randomness is almost always a good idea 🙂

Of course I know that they're furry, but still images like this sort of really brings it home!

It makes me feel that I get a glimpse into their furry world, in a way.

I didn't really think I'd get images like this one, for some reason perhaps those strands of hair kinda were suspended in the air for the ~100th of a second that made the image.

After doing this I definitely feel that I view them differently. Of course I know that they use their whiskers to navigate, but this makes them stand out in such a clear way. Maybe I'll find other ways of working with this, but I suspect that even modern gear won't really outperform that old, super cheap but heavy and high quality zoom!

They really come up with a lot of different expressions when I'm that close with a camera, I guess the next post in #monomad might be about that.

So here is a scary Charcoal to end this post!