This is a rather intense portrait of a very young lion cub from my Kenya photo tour. The cubs all had blue eyes, and I really wanted to show that unusual color in a cat's face. To make the eyes really pop, I had to lighten them somewhat because the deep shade in which the cubs were playing plus my exposure settings dampened the intensity of the blue.
On safari, photographers have to shoot from vehicles. This is obviously to protect us from being eaten, which we definitely would be. The downside of that is it's impossible to shoot from ground level which is the ideal perspective. The only way to overcome the height issue is to use a long lens. The longer the telephoto and the greater the distance the subject is from the vehicle, the more that perspective approaches a ground-level view because the lens becomes more and more parallel with the ground. That's why the perspective here looks good. I used a 500mm lens and the cub was probably 35 feet away. My settings were 1/320, f/4.5, 3200 ISO, and I used image stabilization while hand holding the lens.
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