Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature”. – Albert Einstein

This young female leopard looks to be having the time of her life as she enters the big world out there. She is now solitary and using all the skills her mother taught her over the past two years on how to survive.

We followed her the one morning and she was being her usual self as she went up and down trees and termite mounds. As we continued to follow her, she headed towards this small mound and waited for her on the other side. She laid down and kept looking around for something to hunt.

The light just started falling on this one spot on the mound and that’s when she decided to do a little roll around. She tilted her head back and opened her beautiful eyes, there was no better setting for this and I took the shot.

This will be one of my favourite images of the young Ntsumi female and I can’t wait to watch her grow up!

Equipment Used

• Camera – Canon 7D Mkii
• Lens and Focal length – Sigma 150-600mm F5 – 6.3 DG @261mm

Settings used to capture this image

• ISO – 400
• Aperture – F 5.6
• Shutter – 1/400

In Lightroom I used Vignetting just to darken some of the bright edges of the mound and pushed my shadows up to +25 and Clarity +5.

There wasn’t really any need for editing this image as it was perfect when I took the photo!