I'm headed to South Africa and Namibia on Tuesday to lead another photo tour there. It's interesting that every safari I lead, the pictures I take are so different than the one before. The sightings are different, animal behavior is always different, and the lighting and the backgrounds always change. This is a male lion I captured last time in sunrise lighting, and what's interesting about this shot is the lighting in the eyes. This picture underscores the two best times of day to photograph wildlife -- sunrise/sunset and overcast. A low angled sun illuminates the eyes beautifully. And diffused light, like you can see in the lion's left eye, prevents too much contrast. Therefore, detail is not lost. I shot this with a 400mm focal length on the Canon 7D Mark II -- a cropped sensor camera -- giving me 640mm of focal length. My settings were 1/500, f/8, 400 ISO. This camera has too much noise when shooting in dark conditions and when there are a lot of shadows in the picture, but in bright sunlight at an ISO of 800 or less, it's fine.
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