Red panda

One of the animals my photo tour group and I were able to photograph in China was the red panda. It is not closely related to the giant panda, and it is a lot more difficult to photograph because it moves quickly through dense tree branches. The sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky when I took this, so I had to wait for the animal to enter a shaded area in the tree to get the kind of diffused light you see here. Portions of bright sky seen through the leaves had to be cloned out, otherwise they would have been distracting. My settings for this picture were 1/500, f/8, 8000 ISO, and I used the full zoom on my 100-400mm Canon lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 560mm of focal length. I hand held the Canon 1Dx Mark II. I used Neat Image software to reduce the noise.