Cats and lenses and stability...

Last year, when I was doing some experimenting with older DSLRs, I snapped this picture of Huck perched on his tree in the living room, using a Canon 40D. The only illumination was some sun filtering through cracks in the drapes behind my right-hand shoulder and a 60W-ish incandescent bulb in the floor lamp behind my left shoulder.

It popped up in my Facebook memories yesterday and a friend asked "Ooh, what lens did you use for this? Great subject isolation without doing it in post."

So I dug around and found the EXIF data: EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, shot wide open, 1/30th @ ISO 800.

The 50mm f/1.4 tends to be a little soft when shot wide open, and the lack of image stabilization contributes here, since hand-holding at 50mm lens at 1/30th of a second violates the old rule of thumb about not letting your exposure time be longer than your focal length. This all shows, here. You can't pixel-peep and count the whiskers even on the parts of Huck that are in focus...

But I still like this picture of him. And the f/1.4 aperture made it a picture of just him, and vanished the drapes just a few feet behind him into a smooth blur.
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