November 7, 2011
Cheetah Yawning in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Here's yet another image from my photo tour to Tanzania this past February. I've been going through the images I brought back and processing them through Photoshop. This image jumped out as blog-worthy for two reasons. First, the cheetah is doing something other than just sitting there. Any time you can capture behavior, that adds interest to an image. One behavior that's particularly interesting for predatory mammals is an open mouth because it shows off the business end of the animal. Second, the subject really stands out from the background. This was achieved by using a shallow depth of field (f8 at 700mm) with the subject closer to the camera than the background. Plus it helps that the background has roughly the same tonality throughout so there aren't any distracting hot spots to take your eye off the subject.