I photographed this six month old leopard cub in South Africa after its mother had sent it up a tree as protection from two hyenas on the prowl. What makes this shot especially dynamic are the eyes. In the original capture, the eyes were somewhat dark due to the shadowed opening in the branches. To lighten the eyes and to give them more life, I selected the irises in Photoshop using the lasso tool, feathered the edges five pixels, and then used Image > adjustments > levels to lighten them as well as to add a bit of contrast. That made a huge difference. I took this shot at 1/400th of a second with the new Canon 100-400mm lens on a 7D Mark II. I used the lens fully zoomed out which gave me 640mm due to the 1.6x crop factor. The aperture was f/7.1 and the ISO was 1000.
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