Lion affection

Watching a mother lion with her cub is so sweet, so endearing, and often so comical that it's a thrill to photograph them. I captured this interaction shortly before sunset, and the light was quite low due to a thick cloud cover. Therefore, I had no choice but to use a high ISO in order to use a decent shutter speed. First and foremost, the speed of the shutter has to be fast enough to freeze movement for a sharp picture. Sharpness trumps everything including the desire for depth of field and the need for a noise-free picture. If you use a small aperture for extensive depth of field and a low ISO for a minimum of digital noise, that forces the shutter to be long. In this kind of situation, that's a formula for blurred images and then the shots are ruined. I took this with the 100-400mm Canon zoom using 10 frames per second with the 7D Mark II, and my settings were 1/320, f/5.6, and 2500 ISO. I really wanted a faster shutter to be safe, but the cats weren't moving that much and I thought I could get a sharp picture with 1/320th of a second.