I’ve always loved this picture of a lion cub in Kenya, but in the original shot the white sky was distracting. So, I replaced it with a sky that made more artistic sense. Also, I never liked the out of focus dead tree branch in the foreground. It’s not terrible, but had I been thinking fast enough, I would have focused on the dead wood and photographed it for use in the composite later. The 500mm Canon telephoto I used has shallow depth of field, and that’s why the tree is soft. To minimize the visual impact of the blurred foreground, I used the burn tool to darken it. My settings were 1/400, f/5.0, and 200 ISO. I took this picture in 2008 with the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and because noise was a serious issue then, I elected to use a very low ISO. Today, I would have shot this with, probably, 1250 ISO and used a smaller lens aperture for increased depth of field. You gotta love those ears!
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