Fauxto Friday - "Mama Kitty"

This is our beautiful cat Simba, but we call her Mama Kitty. We weren’t even looking to adopt another pet when she literally found us.

Five years ago, we were standing on the deck enjoying the spring weather when we heard this strange scratching noise. Suddenly, a gray cat appeared on the deck…and promptly strolled through the open door into the house, as if she’d always lived here. We’d seen lots of wild cats in the neighborhood, most of which were either black or gray. I set up a box with some blankets outside for her and waited to see if she would stay or go. She ended up not staying in the box…because we brought her inside, forever. It turned out she was pregnant when she came to live with us, and delivered her litter on Earth Day, just a few weeks after moving in. Simba is a very small cat, and only one of her three babies survived the delivery. She has been the sweetest, most affectionate and loving pet and is 100% the boss of the three much bigger dogs in the house.

I was walking around the backyard with my camera in hand, just wandering and waiting for something to catch my eye. I turned around and saw Mama Kitty lounging below the deck. She didn’t see me at first, which gave me some time to capture some cute yawning photos…      

But it was her “senior pose” that was my favorite among the pictures I took. I was honestly very happy with how the raw photo turned out, but there were just a couple of things that I wanted to improve on. Using the Clone Stamp, I erased the spider web strand from her right ear as well as the reflection in her eyes. With a soft round brush in Soft Light mode, I dabbed a small amount of green into her eyes to deepen her natural color. To finish the image, I used the Camera Raw Filter function to increase the shadow depth and add a soft black vignette border to the entire image.