African Wild Cat Kitten

We came across a pair of African Wild Cat kittens very early one morning during our February 2012 trip to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

I was stoked to be so close to them - they were literally in the shelter of a thorny thicket right by the roadside. The light was awful - overcast, a few minutes before actual sunrise and they were in the shade of a dense thicket...pushed the ISO up on the D3s and wasn't disappointed with the results.

The more adventurous of the duo came out into the lush grass (some good rains were had) but was still under the shade of the thorn thicket.

I had the 1.4x TC on and went for tight portraits as I didn't know how long he would pose like this (hence I didn't want to spend precious time removing the TC).
I had to lower the SS to 1/100 to get ISO from 12800 and 8000 to 5000.

Techs: Nikon D3s with Nikkor 500mm f4 VR-II + 1.4x TC @ 700mm
f5.6 @ 1/100 SS @ ISO-5000

90% of full frame, cropped some OOF greens from bottom
Warmed up WB a tad as it was just 'too green' for my tastes...
Ran Nik Color Efex Tonal Contrast (doing it with many of my shots recently, love the results)