This picture of a yawning leopard in South Africa illustrates one of the few exceptions where out of focus foregrounds work. Usually, they are visually annoying and distracting, but in this case, it's not bad because all of the grasses frame the cat and direct attention to it. In a situation like this, though, you have to be very careful that the autofocus mechanism doesn't lock onto the foreground instead of the subject. Switching to another focus point takes too long. The only solution, in my opinion, is to quickly switch to manual focus to be sure the leopard is sharp. I used a 400mm focal length (the Canon 100-400mm) on a cropped sensor camera, the 7D Mark II, so the focal length was 640mm. My settings were 1/800, f/7.1, and 400 ISO. This camera has so much noise that the pictures above 800 ISO, especially in low light environments, are unusable. That's why I sold it after seeing my images from this trip.
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