"The world is quiet here."

         The theme this week is "quiet." Since Tuesday, I've been contemplating doing shots of meditation for this week's theme. Yesterday, my sister and I took advantage of the wonderful sunset in our backyard. We got the yoga mat out and began shooting several meditation poses. Fifty takes later, I was not entirely satisfied with what was on my camera screen. After brainstorming a few ideas, we decided to add the cats in the mix. We moved the yoga mat to a get a different background and began shooting with one cat at a time. Fifteen minutes or so later, we had the above shot. 

         During post-processing, I furthered blurred the background to add more focus to the subjects in the image. Thereafter, I added some warmth and played around with the HSL levels in Lightroom. Here's a before and after of the image as it was during my Lightroom manipulation. The initial image was just too green for my tastes, I tried to keep the image with a hint of sunset, without adding too much yellow or orange.

           Funny this, this wasn't the image I wanted to submit to Fifty-two Frames. During post-processing, I was quite intrigued with four images. The final decision came down to the above photo and a meditation shot. Here's what my first choice was.

Quiet         I just couldn't decide between the two. Eventually, I asked for second opinions. The vote was unanimous for the first photo. At this point, I'd have to agree, since the first photo seems to exuberate a type of tranquility, calmness and intimacy that the second one doesn't. Even though the second one seems to fit more with the theme, the first image is more personal. What do you think? Here are some other shots I had a difficult time with during my elimination process.

Kitty love

       Special thank you to my sister for enduring the relentless mosquitoes throughout this shoot. Look closely, you can seen one of those suckers feasting on her leg in the upper right image.

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