I am not a fan of using flash in nature unless I want to do something 'artsy' in the field. But in this particular situation, the margay was in the very dark shadows of the jungle in Costa Rica. If I exposed for the cat and didn't use flash, the background would have huge areas of blown out highlights. That would have been seriously distracting to the subject. Therefore, I balanced the flash on the foreground with the ambient light on the background. To do that, I set the Canon 580EX flash to ETTL and the camera to aperture priority. I had to raise the ISO to make sure the shutter speed was fast enough in this low light situation to insure a sharp picture. My settings were 1/100, ISO 1250, f/8, hand held.
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