I took this picture of an ocelot kitten on my first trip to Peru. Its mother had been killed by poachers, so the lodge in which I was staying had rescued the kitten and was raising it to be released back into the wild. I took this in the late 70's with my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RB 67, and I was forced to use a flash because the jungle floor is very dark. Back then, the highest ISO I used for wildlife was 100. Even if I pushed the film two f/stops to 400, that wouldn't have been fast enough to enable a fast shutter for sharp pictures. Therefore, my only option was to use flash. The good news about that, however, was the cat's intensely blue eyes look incredible. My settings were unrecorded, but knowing how I used to shoot they were probably 1/125, f/8, and definitely 100 ISO. We are so accustomed to relying on autofocus now that it's hard to relate to photographing wildlife with manual focus, but that's what I had to do back then.
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