This is a margay, a rarely seen jungle cat I was lucky enough to capture in Costa Rica. The only reason I was able to take this picture was because the cat hung around a private home and it was often seen shortly after dawn. The owner would leave a bowl of milk for it, and sometimes the cat came out of the forest to drink. I took this with a Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera along with a portable Metz flash. The dark jungle environment made it very challenging to shoot with 100 ISO film -- my standard speed for wildlife in the film days -- so the additional fill flash was needed. The camera was completely manual, including focus, and that presented a serious challenge in obtaining sharp images. Still, I was able to get three decent shots before the margay melted into the jungle and disappeared. My settings were unrecorded, but based on how I used to shoot, they were probably 1/125, f/5.6, and I used a 350mm lens (equivalent to a 200mm telephoto in the full frame digital format). There were quite a few out of focus white areas of the sky seen through the foliage, and I used Photoshop to clone them out because they took attention away from the margay.
1 Comments
Oct 15, 2019, 10:40:21 PM
Bob Vestal - Thanks for sharing this. It always is impressive to see the wonderful photographs that you made with film and your Mamiya.