Last night, looking out onto the street from my bedroom window, I saw a local stray cat, who just so happens to be the mother of my now non-stray kitten. It's always nice to see her, but there was the added surprise, last night, of seeing her with three new kittens in tow.

Being a very cautious cat, all of them were immersed in the one part of the street which isn't lit by street-lamps. The skies were heavily overcast and there was no moon.

Of course, for prosperity's sake, I wanted pictures of my kitten's new brothers and sisters but I worried about being able to focus on them at all. When you're using a telephoto lens to photograph things relatively far away, the AF illuminator that some cameras have just doesn't cut it, particularly when your subject is a rather unhelpful low-contrast black colour!

So, this is what I did: I laid a bicycle light on the floor and manually focussed on the kittens in the light this provided. I found that, even with this level of illumination, the AF on my camera hunted considerably, so I switched to manual focus mode.

I also used a flash, with a diffuser, pointing straight up to the sky to provide a little more much needed illumination and, also, give me the opportunity to use a relatively small aperture (f5.6/f8) to give my focussing a little margin for error.

A bribe in the shape of a tin of sardines also helped.
Pictures available HERE if they don't show below.

Soo CUTE!

Here's a couple of Available Darkness photos made when I first got my Fuji F10.

3sec, f/2.8, ISO800:

1/4sec f/2.8 ISO800:


This last one I messed with in PS, making it monochrome & lightening it, added some reticulation... Pushing the sensor like this on the F10 makes the pixels/noise appear in grid lines.

Nice pics, Nesster! Update on the kittens: mother has been taken in by an elderly couple down the street. She's being neuteured tomorrow, and the kittens are being taken away at the same time to be homed properly. All's well that ends well :-)

Good to hear, spaying and neutering is a good idea for most pets if services are available (not all the world has good facilities for this). The top cat is just like one I had (my wifes before we married). She liked me and really liked me ONLY when she was in heat and avoided me (and all men) most of the time. It really was an ON/OFF - either won't stop rubbing against me and purring or climbing on whatever I was reading/doing/working on, or she'd be silent and hiding if I was home and dashing out of a room if I entered. She was an indoor only cat, but got out and froze to death -- found her 20 feet from the (closed) door.

I agree that in low-light/no-light situations it is often best to NOT use the maximum aperture but give yourself some usable depth of field for guessing the focus.... IF (as you did) you will be able to momentarily have some additional lighting when the shot happens (flash).

>Available Darkness

I like that term, Nesster! Perfectly descriptive...

Apparently, American vets neuter female cats very differently from the way vets do it in England.... Here, it's a little keyhole op...

Way off topic...

Well, the female cat I was speaking about above was in Russia. In the US I've always had no problems getting a spay or neuter operation done with the animals recoving quickly. For a normal spay, the incision is quite small. The only exception was an older cat I was given (now back in the USA) who was a "farmyard cat but never had kittens" so ahem, "something wasn't working there since there was plenty of opportunity". After a few months in our household, a routine checkup found her uterus enlarging so I had a hysterectomy performed which became a "show operation" (the vets had all staff and assistants, etc. in to see) since it was unusual and when removed was "the largest they had ever seen one". Alas, a year later she developed cancer (was this part of the enlarged uterus? They didn't think so at the time of the hysterextomy.)

Semi-on-topic - isn't it fascinating how with the extra reflective layer in their eyes cats can "see pretty well in almost no light". They can't see in pitch black, but it sure seems they can sometimes! I always bump into something getting up in pitch black with cats in the room, but I've never stepped on them or heard them hit anything.

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Hiding, those pictures came out great. You have a true gift!