Ain't No Cure for the Suppertime Blues

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Make a moody picture. By which you can use mood lighting of some sort, or possibly arty black-and-white, or whatever you need to in order to give the shot that certain moodiness. It's hard to describe, but you'll know it when you see it, I'm sure.

I love this topic! I'm not sure I did it justice, but I've given it my best shot. This is actually Phase One of my response, featuring my usual photographic subject. Phase Two, tomorrow night, will be Something Completely Different.

I shot these tonight as we tried to persuade Tuffy to eat some Mighty Dog canned food. She...sampled it. Reluctantly. Now she's on the prowl for something better, but we took away whatever was left several hours ago. She has her second radiation treatment in the morning, and isn't allowed food after 10 PM.


This shot was taken without flash, and then lightened considerably. It's a bit grainy, but you have to expect that. This light over her dish is a flower power nightlight, a gift from my friend Linda some years ago. Tuffy really does look moody here, and the lighting is part of it. She seems to be contemplating the fact that the food in her dish isn't what she wants, and her people are letting her down in that respect.


Here she gives me the Look. I took this one by holding my finger over part of the flash, resulting in the left half of the image being rather dark. When I lightened the image up a bit, parts of her face turned a color somewhere between hot pink and what Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons, used to call "Flesh." I've done my best to clone that out. Notice how the mouth isn't closed quite right, as if the tip of her tongue is in the way. It probably is.

For this one I covered a little too much of the flash, which turned the whole shot red. I've desaturated it a bit as well as lightened it.

Same shot. The lighting effects "Moonlight" and "Cool" didn't look good on this picture, so I used a new-to-me tool, "Magnetic lasso," to outline Tuffy, and then selected the inverse. After I changed the hue on the background to blue, I used Autoenhance. That shifted the blue toward turquiose/cyan, and the red back toward Tuffy's normal color, so I went with it.


Poor Tuftuf! She really doesn't look happy in these photos, but it was all about her suppertime ennui, exacerbated by her tongue, which is probably giving her some discomfort and awkwardness. But the oncology assistant says she will feel better with each treatment, cumulatively. Hope so! This is another shot for which I had to clone out that nasty "flesh" color. It was taken with a slow flash setting, which I had never tried before. Some of the chrome of the chair behind her to the left caught the flash and came out white, so I toned that down, too, again using the clone tool.

Tuffy's tongue will never be normal again, but we hope it will at least be healthier after all this. But Tuffy, who has always been a picky eater, will undoubtedly remain so. She'll probably do better after the treatment is over, but for her, there really ain't no cure for the suppertime blues. That we can afford, anyway.


Karen

P.S. Part Three of "Later This Somewhere", in which Sandy of "The Jace Letters" discovers a time traveling theatre troupe, is now online. Thanks, Sarah, for collaborating with me!