I think if this world didn’t have puppies and kittens, it would be significantly diminished. There is nothing that makes me instantly feel good like seeing, playing with, and photographing puppies and kittens -- even wild ones. This baby cheetah, probably about 8 weeks old, was as cute as they come. The little face seems so innocent with no knowledge that soon it will have to kill to survive. I captured this picture with a 400mm focal length. With telephoto lenses, you have to be cognizant of having a certain amount of depth of field to show crisp detail in the important areas of the subject. For example, my aperture here was f/8. That was enough to render the cub’s head and ears sharp, but the light fur on the cheetah’s back is soft. The longer the lens, the more this becomes a critical issue. Because the cat’s head protruded from the rest of its body by a few inches, and because a 400mm lens has shallow depth of field especially when the subject is close (about 15 feet in this case), I would have had to choose at least f/16, but probably f/22, to render that light patch of fur sharp. My shutter was 1/640 and the ISO was 800. I photographed this cub at a rescue facility in Namibia (visited on my Namibia photo tour) dedicated to saving animals, especially big cats, from farmers who would otherwise kill them.
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