How The Heck Do You Take Pictures Of A Black Cat?

[kittycat93]

Black cats have a superpower, like vampires, of not appearing in photos. I joke.

But seriously does anyone have any tips? I mainly use my smartphone but even my DSLR struggles to focus on black cats. So I’m guessing I probably need to do manual focus.

 

[engine4154]

That and/or bright lighting. The autofocus on most of my cameras struggled with the same thing here.

Good luck!

 

[1CatOverTheLine]

.
K kittycat93 - It's not "focus" that's the problem; focus merely defines the plane between the camera and the subject at which the lens is at optimum sharpness.

The autofocus features on most DSLR cameras (the Nikon Df being the sole exception as far as I know) is based on a averaging light metering system, with the exposure meter evaluating light measured from all parts of the visual frame, and then generating an average reading. High contrast subjects, like a black cat on a lighter-coloured background, fool the meter into giving you an average which has no real relationship to the foreground/background configuration.

Back in the days when I was middle-aged, and very few dinosaurs were left on earth, everyone had a light meter with a spot attachment, and pointing the spot attachment right at the subject always resulted in either a perfect reflectivity reading or a badly scratched hand. No doubt you can still buy a Gossen LunaPro SBC at an antique shop, but for those who won't, just shoot three exposures, and bracket them. If your camera suggests F5.6 at 1/60th of a second, shoot a second exposure at F5.6 at 1/30th of a second, and one at F5.6 at 1/125th of a second.

When you know that your camera's averaging metering system is lying to you, as with black cats, bracket upwards two, leaving the camera's suggestion as the 'darkest' exposure, and then adding one and two-stop aperture adjustments [e.g. if your camera suggests F5.6 at 1/60th of a second, shoot a second exposure at F5.6 at 1/30th of a second, and one at F5.6 at 1/15th of a second].

Below: top: the camera's wild guess; middle: a concession of one F stop; bottom, two stops overexposed: