Very cute! I like the second picture better. Is that kitten supposed to be black too? 🙂
I don’t have a whole lot tips, but I guess I can try to help!
Little black animals are hard to auto-focus on; there’s not much contrast, so the camera has a hard time. I don’t know much to tell you about how to fix it, except to make sure you’re photographing in plenty of light! If there’s a catchlight in the eyes, you might be able to focus on that. 🙂
As for exposure, that’s a bit complicated as well! Definitely don’t use “Spot” metering mode, set it to “Matrix”. If you’re using Spot, and point it at a dark object, it will try to brighten it up to 18% grey, or whatever your camera meter thinks is optimal. That will severely over-expose your picture. Matrix will look at the whole picture and try to make it an even exposure. If your black animal fills the frame, then even Matrix will probably over-expose, so you might end up needing to use Exposure Compensation to darken the photo a little.
I generally get somewhat over-exposed pictures anyway, which I then import into Lightroom, and use the Exposure and Black sliders to make the blacks in the picture look black, not grey. (Or is it “gray”?) You can do something very similar with RAWTherapee.
(I did a quick edit to your picture here, as the coloring seemed to be just a little bit on the purplish side. I changed the color temperature to be a little warmer, and adjusted the tint toward the green side to get rid of the purplish cast. I also did a little curve to try to make the blacks look a little blacker).
