Godox Ring72 and Ernest!

I have a fairly cool cat (or if you ask the wife ‘bat shit crazy cat’, or the daughter ‘a bumhole cat!’) named Ernest. He is almost 3 years old now and took on the traits of our old Border Terrier, Rohan (who sadly is no longer with us) so he acts more dog than cat!!

I wanted to try some photos of Ernest close up to get his face and tongue and maybe a paw reaching for his chicken flavour Webbox Lick-e-Lix, this is in the style of @furryfritz Nils Jacobi who I follow on Instagram and some of his fantastic work with cats. I’m a long way from his following this first practice effort!

So I tried, with the daughters help (@kittyredreads) putting some chicken flavour lick-e-lix onto my new Godox Ring72 macro ring light in the hope he would come towards the camera and try to lick the paste off.

Then I tried the hole in a box hoping he would stick his head and arm through to get the lick-e-lix. However his brain cell was occupied this afternoon and it didn’t really work!!

Godox Ring72

The Godox RING72 Macro Ring Light is a compact, versatile, and lens-mountable LED Macro Ring Light designed to meet the needs of photographers and videographers specializing in close-up work. With 8 watts of power and a daylight-balanced color temperature of 5600K, the RING72 delivers soft, glowing, on-axis lighting, eliminating harsh shadows and ensuring every detail is illuminated with precision.

Ideal for photographing small subjects such as jewelry, insects, and flowers, the RING72 is also well-suited for professionals in medical or forensic fields, such as dentists or pathologists, who require accurate and well-lit close-up images.

The Godox Ring72 light has worked well with my Nikon Z8, I have some more practice to with it and the cat photos. It will also be good to use with my lightbox and some macro focus stacking pictures when the summer flowers are in bloom.

From this little photo shoot I can tell already the things I need to improve on.
– Use one of my photo backgrounds as this will help pick the cat out more with the Godox Ring72 light and there is a lot of cclutter in the kitchen.
– Decide which lens will be better for the cat shoots. My Tamron 90mm was too long sat at my kitchen table, my Viltrox 35mm wasn’t fast enough focus, so I switched to my Nikon 24-50mm which was fast enough focus (I went up to 10fps) and it was close enough on my table.
– Play with more back light to see if this improves the shot.
– Get the cat to cooperate more, which is probably the hard part! Although with more practice and Lick-e-Lix he might improve.

Here are some of the best shots that I’ve done with some light editing to in Lightroom.