This is a rarely seen margay, a small jungle cat native to Central and South America. I was lucky enough to photograph this one in Costa Rica. A local man living in the forest would leave food out for the margay, and a few times during the week the wild cat would visit his property to feed. This typically happened at dawn, so I was there at 6am hoping for a sighting. I used a 70-200m lens which tells you how close I was. I had only a few moments where photography was feasible, and then he disappeared into the thick undergrowth. The ambient light was quick dark. In 2009 I was using the Canon 5D Mark II, and noise was a much more significant issue back then compared to now. Therefore, I kept the ISO to 320. This forced the shutter to be too slow -- 1/60th of a second -- but I took a chance in getting a sharp picture. The lens had a maximum aperture of f/2.8, and I wanted a certain amount of depth of field so I shot this at f/5.0.
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