Sam asks if such an innocent face could have caused such mischief to the Christmas tree? And besides, he requests that the case be thrown out of court since there is no evidence that cats caused the damage to the tree. Furthermore, he requests that the prosecution be barred from making further libelous claims and slanderous insults.

New rule for 2009: the cats are no longer allowed to watch Law & Order!

I may regret this since it shows even after all this time how inept I can be as a photographer, but here’s a little look at how I first saw an opportunity in my mind (the top picture) and then worked my way towards one of my favorites of the year (the bottom picture, posted previously).

When I first saw Sam sleeping on the window seat and realized I could frame him between the reflection of our tree lights and the Christmas lights of the house across the street, I grabbed my camera and turned on a lamp in the room to add some light. The light levels were still extremely low so I set the camera’s sensitivity to its highest and the aperture to its widest, yielding as high a shutter speed as possible to minimize camera shake while I handheld the camera.

I framed the picture so our tree lights would dominate the left of the picture and the house lights the right, with Sam nestled in between. With the wonders of image stabilization, I then took a number of pictures knowing some would come out acceptably sharp.

So far so good.

But when reviewing the results on camera I was distraught to see my reflection in the large picture window. I was wearing a black skull cap (for warmth and not skullduggery) and that’s my head you can see rising above Sam’s, which I missed when taking the picture as in person the scene was much darker than it appears in the picture.

So step one was to get rid of my reflection by lowering myself towards the ground, but I had to go so low that I could no longer see enough of the lights. Since Sam was in a deep sleep, I crept back to my office to get my tripod. I set the camera as high as I could to keep as many lights in view as possible but just low enough that Sam’s body would block the camera from reflecting in the window.

My head would still be a problem since it would be higher than the camera, so I attached a remote cable release and shot the pictures from below. First problem solved!

The second major problem was created by my framing, where I tried to get as much of the Christmas lights in the picture as possible. A good instinct, but this added a distracting bright light on the right side thanks to the porch light. Since I couldn’t very well go over in the middle of the night to ask the neighbors to turn off their porch light, I simply tightened the composition so that the porch light is just off screen and surrendered some of the Christmas lights.

The other two problems solved themselves. There were some lights from the house directly across the street that I found a little distracting, which show up where the reflection of my head, but they went away when I lowered the camera. Same goes for some of the ground lights in the house on the right.

The other problem that was solved was that, thanks to my tripod, I could drop the sensitivity and get rid of a lot of the associated noise. This is one example of the shot I ended up with (posted previously), as you can see with the change in the cameras level I gave up some of the Christmas lights but overall I think the changes make for a far superior picture.

I also much prefer Sam’s pose in the final shots but can take no credit for it, he just happened to shift around while I was working. All thanks go to the posing prowess of my little model who knows how to be photogenic even in his sleep.

Once I had the basic scene the way I wanted, I was free to play around with post-processing and aperture selection as well as lighting levels to make subtle variations of the same basic image.

Today (December 22nd) is the one year anniversary of the day we brought Sam and Emma home, so in honor of the many happy days they have brought us I’ll post a few more shots from the series of one of my favorite pictures of 2008, little Sam sleeping with Christmas lights in the background.

The top two pictures are actually one picture processed differently in Adobe Camera RAW. I keep going back and forth as to which one I prefer. I stopped down the aperture in this shot compared to the pictures I posted previously, which brings the background into sharper focus.

These shots are two separate pictures, differing from the above pictures in the lighting (only Christmas tree lights for these pictures, the tree lights plus a lamp in the pictures above) and from each other in the aperture setting. The first picture uses a stopped down aperture (f/8 vs f/4) to keep the background in sharper focus. The picture with the more blurred background (which I’ve posted before) tends to put the focus more on just Sam, where the first picture also emphasizes the environment.

The forecast for a winter storm held true and we got quite a bit of snow today. The cats seemed rather agitated during the day but by the evening were ready to settle in for their naps. Scout was holding fast on her favorite winter spot, the wooden grate above the heating vent, so Sam took the vacated window seat.

Even as the snowstorm raged on the other side of the window, Sam finally fell into a deep sleep. I grabbed my camera when I saw that I could frame him between the Christmas lights of the neighbors across the street and the reflection of our Christmas tree in the window.

The top picture is lit by the lights of our tree and a room lamp while the bottom one is lit only by the tree lights. They each have a different feel but I like them both, I deliberately left the color warm since I think it works best for this scene.