This is a wild margay, a small, nocturnal jungle cat native to Central and South America. I captured this one in Costa Rica. It's rarely seen, and I was lucky to get this. In the original shot, there was a lot of white sky seen through the forest so I used the clone tool to eliminate those distracting portions of the background. I cloned from another picture with out of focus jungle foliage into the background here. To balance the light on the margay with the backlighting from the sky, I used fill flash -- something I usually don't like to do with wildlife. I prefer soft, diffused light, but the contrast was too much in this situation for a digital sensor to handle. It was exactly what was needed here. I then had to clone out the reflections of the flash in the eyes. My settings were 1/60, f/5.0, and 320 ISO.
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