This is one of my favorite pictures from Africa. You can already see the intensity, the focus, in the little cheetah cubs that will serve them well when they are hunting on their own. I took this picture around 11am and the sun's light was harsh, but the cats were in the shade of a thicket. Thus, they were lit by diffused light. The original background sky was white because it was so bright,, so I replaced it in Photoshop with out of focus clouds. I had to make the background blurred because the leaves behind the cheetahs were soft due to shallow depth of field from the use of my Canon 500mm f/4. If the clouds were sharp, it wouldn't make sense. My settings were 1/500, f/5.6, and 200 ISO. I was grateful all three cats were on the same plane. With a large aperture on a long lens, depth of field falls off very quickly, and it was absolutely essential that all three of these guys were sharp.
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