Leaping leopard

As my photo tour group was watching this leopard in Botswana, I told them to get ready because I thought the cat was going to jump from one branch to another. I remember thinking, is this what I believe will happen or is it what I want to happen? Probably both. I had my group set their shutter speed fast enough to freeze the hoped-for action. Finally, the leopard made its leap. I took this shot in 2005 with my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II. Its frame rate was only 4 frames per second -- ridiculous by today's standards -- but I was still able to capture the cat nicely centered between the two limbs. This was luck, nothing more. It was sunset time, and the colors in the sky were in the west. My Land Rover was positioned such that I was shooting east, and this produced a white sky. Therefore, in post-processing, I took the colorful western sky and replaced the white background with it which made a huge improvement. My settings were 1/250, f/5.0, and 640. I would have liked a faster shutter, but noise was a serious problem in 2005. 1600 ISO on this camera was basically unusable. 3200 was horrible.