Intimate portrait of a predator

There is something about the faces of cats. They hold our attention because they are intriguing intense, beautiful, and endearing. This is true for big cats and little cats. On safari, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, and rhinos are all great to see and photograph, but no one is really satisfied until they see cats. I captured this intimate portrait of a male lion with a 500mm f/4 telephoto in Kenya. My settings were 1/160, f/13, and 200 ISO. I was resting the lens on a bean bag for stability which is why my shutter speed wasn’t very fast. Usually, the shutter should be the reciprocal of the focal length -- in this case 1/500 -- but the bean bag acted like a tripod.