These are wild jaguars in the Pantanal region of Brazil. They are brothers and hadn't taken a mate yet, so they were alway seen together. Here, my local guide spotted them on a sand bar; to fill the frame I used a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. We slowly drifted past the cats in our boat, and this changed the composition second by second. To catch every nuance of each angle, I shot with 14 frames per second. The jaguars were so close together that they were essentially on the same plane. This meant depth of field was not an issue. My settings were 1/2000, f/5.6, and 1250 ISO. The shutter had to be fast to guarantee sharp images given the movement of the boat and the weight of the lens causing its own movement as a I hand held the camera. A tripod in a boat is useless in my opinion, and hand holding gives you complete and uninhibited freedom of movement. My next photo tour to the Pantanal is in November 2022.
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