Photographers are always trying to fill the frame with wildlife, and I do the same. That's why we want long lenses, and usually the longer the better. Sometimes, though, it's nice to include the enviornment to show context and to tell a story. I took this picture of a leopard in the private reserve of Sabi Sabi in South Africa, and at first I was frustrated that my 500mm of focal length didn't enable me to fill the frame with the cat. But when I saw the image, I felt it was fine the way I shot it. Yes, the background and the tree branches on which the leopard is perched are busy, but not all pictures have to be clean, graphic, and worthy of being called fine art. Interspersed among the fine art images I like to show the gritty reality of nature. I think this picture does that. The golden glow of sunrise adds a lot to this, and I would add that if the lighting weren't so beautiful I probably wouldn't like the shot as much. My settings for this picture were 1/640, f/6.3, 400 ISO.
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