At first you might have assumed this is AI. You might have thought, ‘There he goes again, creating something wild and crazy!’ But this time you’d be wrong. This is an unmanipulated photograph. I don’t usually use flash with wildlife because I don’t like that look, but this was an unusual situation. My photo tour group and I were heading back to our floating lodge in the Pantanal region of Brazil when we spotted this jaguar resting on the bank of the river. It was almost dark, and instead of raising the ISO to uncomfortable heights, I used a flash. What I didn’t expect was the very eerie yellow reflections in the eyes. We’ve all seen red eye, and in some animals like dogs I’ve seen the reflection from a flash bouncing off the retina as green. But I’d never seen this kind of yellow in the eyes of any animal. The reason the retina is reflecting the bright light in this case is because I used a 500mm focal length. The flash was mounted in the hot shoe of the camera. That means the imaginary line from the flash to the jaguar’s eyes was almost parallel with the line from the lens to the eyes. The light, then, reflected off the cat’s retina directly back into the lens. The camera settings were 1/60, f/4.0, and 1600 ISO. I really should have used a faster shutter, but I was trying to capture some of the ambient light to mix with the artificial light of the flash.
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