As cute as this is, it was a very difficult photograph to deal with because of the contrast. On one of my photo tours to Africa, we found this mother cheetah and her cub in the shade of a thicket at 11 o'clock in the morning. While the cats were in diffused light, the background was sunny -- a terrible combination. In order to make this acceptable, I had to expose this so the background didn't go too light (or I'd lose the detail and texture) and the cheetahs didn't become too dark. Then, in post-processing, I had to further tweak this to reduce the contrast. When you darken an area of a color image, the areas affected (in this case the out of focus background) often become unrealistically saturated, so I had to selectively reduce saturation as well. To do that, I selected the background with the quick selection tool in Photoshop and then feathered the edge 40 pixels. Next, I opened Image > adjustments > hue/saturation and moved the saturation slider to the left. My settings for this picture were 1/250, f/8, 200 ISO, and I used a 500mm f/4 Canon lens along with a 2x teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length. I took this several years ago when I was still using the Canon 5D Mark II. Today, with my 1Dx Mark II Canon, I would have raised the ISO to 1250 or so to increase the speed of the shutter and without fearing a gain in noise.
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