Serval kitten

This is a 6-week old serval cat, native to Africa. I photographed it at the Nashville Zoo yesterday. It was one of the most challenging photographic situations I’ve ever done. Baby animals born in captivity are protected from human germs by isolating them for the first many weeks of their lives. So, I was shooting through a large glass window facing the outside. Other people were observing the serval kittens as well, and their reflections made photography impossible. Only if I shot from a particular angle, and only if I placed the lens up against the glass was I able to get a halfway decent shot. Because the cats were so small, I lay on the ground to get an eye-level shot. Of course, the background was terrible, so I replaced it with black. It was very tricky working around the fine hair and whiskers, but eventually I was able to do it. I used a 100-500mm lens, set to 200mm, and the settings were 1/640, f/6.3, and 6400 ISO. The glass window was tempered, and it changed the color of the images in such a way that it was very, very difficult to bring the color back to what I saw. This image is close, but it’s not 100% accurate.