The cats came out fine but the background is way too distracting to me anyway
Oh, I definitely agree. This is just what our sofa cover looks like. This isn't exactly an example of photography (and the last picture is overexposed compared to the previous ones but one could fix that in post-production if one really cared), more of curation. "Pictures should tell a story."
The real story is quite different: the left two cats are siblings (believe it or not), the right cat is a stray that decided the food on our premises was reason enough to stay put. The left cat (only tomcat of the three) hates the right one and tends to attack and/or hunt it, never mind that in an actual fight he usually ends up as the loser.
So the actual (but not all that interesting) story was that somehow all three of the cats ended up on the sofa and I was able to take a shot of them without carnage. The middle picture is actually more reflective of this dynamic.
But that's the insider story. When pruning down this set of photographs (who needs the same motive half a dozen times?) I found a silly outside story around the weird symmetry of the last picture, and the other two pictures I kept could be warped to that story.
I do admit that I started picking the hay off the sofa after viewing the first pictures (with modest success) since I found it distracting. But removing the cover would not really have worked.
I do have to apologize for the shoddy artwork.
