One of the fascinating things about an African safari is that the predators, especially the cats, aren't frightened by the Land Rovers, and they typically allow a very close approach. In fact, sometimes they get too close for good photography. On my last trip to Kenya, a lion walked over to my open vehicle and started munching on one of our tires! For this portrait of a cheetah cub, I used a 400mm focal length to fill the frame with that adorable face. The camera -- the Canon 7D Mark II --had a cropped sensor, so the actual focal length was 640mm (the multiplication factor is 1.6). Still, to capture this kind of closeup intimacy with a small cub illustrates how close I was. My settings were 1/640, f/8, and 800 ISO.
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