Drawing from a photograph that is too bright
The problem is that your reference photograph suffers from overexposure.
However, this image apparently contains sufficient information to tweak it to reasonable levels in Photoshop using the 'Curves' tool:

Nevertheless, I still suggest you pick a better photograph as reference: this one has a very small depth of field (i.e. the amount of spatial depth in the photo that is reasonably focused), and the level of detail on the cat's visible flank is very low (due to the high illumination of the photo and the DOF).
Here is the tweaked version of the photograph, if you insist on using it.

This question seems related to How to draw human body in chest/collarbone area?, where drawing proper shapes was problematic due to the reference image being underlit (or because the subject had insufficient lighting).