Wild jaguar

I photographed this jaguar swimming across a river in the Pantanal region of Brazil. I was shooting from a boat with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto. The settings on my camera had been set for shooting small birds in flight, hence the big numbers: 1/8000, f/9, and 5000 ISO. I didn’t have time to change the settings when the people in my photo tour group and I spotted the cat swimming. Jaguars take most of their prey from rivers, so they are extremely adept at maneuvering in the water. This image is uncropped -- that's how close we were. Even though I’ve used a prime lens for many years, I now prefer the compositional flexibility with zooms. My lens of choice is a 100-500mm zoom with, if needed, a 1.4x teleconverter. I don’t have a large maximum aperture, and sometimes that’s an issue. But the ability to compose a subject with a zoom offers so many artistic options. My next available tour to the Pantanal is December 1 - 9, 2025.