I photographed this family of lions walking down a dirt road in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. My 500mm Canon telephoto provided limited depth of field with the f/4 aperture I used, so when I focused on the mother, the cubs in front of her and behind her were somewhat soft. I ran the image through Topaz AI Sharpen, and that helped. I took this picture in 2007 just a couple years after I'd made the transition from film to digital. If I were to see this kind of photo opportunity now, I would use a fast frame rate and take several images, focusing on each cat and using a smaller aperture, and then I'd assemble the components using Photoshop for the perfect image. Now we can raise the ISO quite a bit without compromising on quality. I shot this at 200 ISO because above 1000, images were too noisy back then. That's why the aperture was so large, and that's also why my shutter was, by today's standards, much too slow at 1/100th of a second. I'm lucky the subjects are as sharp as they are.
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