On my first trip to Peru in 1977, I stayed at a jungle lodge in Iquitos and met this four month old ocelot kitten. Sadly its mother had been killed by poaches, and the kind people at the lodge were raising it to be released back into the wild. They called her 'Lady T' -- for tigresa, or tigress in English. During dinner, Lady T would climb up on my lap, then up on the table, and share my meal with me. It was a very special and very endearing experience. To get this picture, we put Lady T on the floor of the jungle and I shot from ground level with a flash. I was shooting with medium format film -- the Mamiya RZ 67 -- and the combination of the dark environment, the very slow film by today's standards, and the slow lenses for this system forced me to use flash to get a usable picture. Without the bright artificial light, though, those incredible blue eyes wouldn't be as pronounced. My settings were unrecorded, but they were probably 1/125, f/8, and Ektachrome 64. I used a 250mm lens (equivalent to a 135mm in the full frame digital format), and a Metz 60 CT-1 flash. The transparency was scanned by an Imacon scanner.
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