Mating lions

On one of my African safaris in Kenya, love was definitely in the air. My photo tour group and I photographed several pairs of mating lions. This head-on shot is my favorite. I find it somewhat humorous the way the male is so -- shall we say -- emotional, while the female, it seems, couldn't care less. I took this in 2007 with my first serious digital camera, a Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was an issue above 800 ISO. So, I tended to shoot with low ISO settings. That meant my shutter speeds weren't as fast as I'd use today. I captured this picture with a 500mm f/4 telephoto plus a 2x teleconverter, giving me 1000mm of focal length. My shutter should have been 1/1000th of a second or faster. Instead, with the 200 ISO setting, the shutter was only 1/320 at f/9. That's not fast enough for such a long lens. Even resting the camera on a bean bag ddin't stabilize it enough for a shutter this slow. The picture is sharp but not razor sharp.