This is a caracal, a small wild cat native to much of Africa. I captured this portrait in Namibia, but there was a problem. The caracal was under a bush and its face was in shadow. The out of focus grasses in the background were much brighter, and consequently they were distracting. Usually, you want the subject to be brighter than the background because our attention goes to the brightest part of a picture first, and then it returns and says focused on that area -- which, ideally, should be the subject. In Adobe Camera Raw I darkened the background and lightened the cat's face with the adjustment brush. For the eyes, I made the brush smaller and lightened the eyes just enough to make them luminous. My settings for the photograph were 1/500, f/8, 800 ISO. I used the new Canon 100-400mm telephoto on a cropped sensor camera giving me 560mm of focal length.
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