I know this shot looks like I was sitting right in front of the mother cheetah and her cubs, but in actuality I was about 60 feet away and shooting with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto. I took this with my first serious digital camera in 2008, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and because of the noise problem with images above 1000 ISO, I tried to keep the ISO as low as possible. That meant, in this case, the lens aperture had to be large to gather enough light for a proper exposure. That, in turn, meant the three cats needed to be essentially on the same plane -- i.e. as equidistant as possible to the camera. That's what I waited for as I watched the cheetah family through the viewfinder. The depth of field, then, would be sufficient to get all three subjects sharply in focus. My settings were 1/500, f/5.6, and 200 ISO. I used a bean bag resting on the windowsill of the Land Rover to support the heavy camera and lens.
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