The leap

I've only see a leopard leap from one branch to another once, in Botswana. My photo tour group and I were watching the leopard in a tree, and its body language changed slightly and I thought it was going to make the leap. I told everyone to get ready, and within five seconds of that he jumped. I shot this in 2013, and at the time I was still using the Canon 5D Mark II with only 3.9 frames per second. By today's standards this is pathetically slow, especially for wildlife action, but fortunately that was enough to capture a perfect positioning of the cat in the frame as well as a strong, graphic shape against the bright sky. To be honest, I got lucky. I used a 500mm lens plus a 2x teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length, and my settings were 1/1000, f/16, and 320 ISO. The subtle sunset colors in the sky washed out completely due to the extreme contrast, and I ended up with a dark silhouette against a white sky. So, I took a separate picture of the sky and then used Photoshop to replace the unattractive white background that resulted from the camera's inability to capture what I could see.