Baby elephant nursing

This is a baby elephant nursing from its mother in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. I took this with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto plus a 2x teleconverter, giving me 1000mm of focal length. What is particularly interesting about this picture is that it was taken about 11 o'clock in the morning and the lighting was very harsh due to the overhead sun. The huge bulk of the mother's body was blocking the sunlight from the baby, and that's why the light in this image appears diffused. I used such a long focal length in an attempt to eliminate the bright sunlight on the ground and on parts of the mother's body that would have been terribly distracting. Just below the baby's mouth I could see sunlight hitting the ground between the legs of the mother. The tight composition eliminated that. My settings for this shot were 1/100, f/8, and 200 ISO. My shutter speed was much too slow for so much focal length, but this was taken with my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was a significant problem in 2008. For a quality image, the ISO had to be low. I rested the lens on a bean bag which helped produce a sharp picture.