Shazam

Shazam is another of the more spectacular cats at the sanctuary, he is a black leopard (not to be confused with the black jaguar I posted earlier). He was a very high stress cat when he came to the sanctuary, but Trista (the head keeper) has put in a lot of work with him since he showed up. It has definitely payed off; he's still a pretty high stress cat, but the bond he and Trista have is pretty impressive. He was very tough to shoot, black things can be difficult to focus on.

Close Up

Titan again, but this time I tried to capture some of his personality, and the emotions surrounding his previous life and rescue, by focusing just on the eye region. This turned out as one of two photos that I think really capture the essence of the sanctuary, you can almost sense some of the abuse and sadness in his past, but you also recognize that those problems really are in the past for him. Like he's finally found some peace.

Titan

This is Titan again. There will be a lot of him popping up around here soon. Not much more to say than I already did on the other one of him posted already.

Not all the cats were big

This is one of many servals in residence at the sanctuary. They're very popular as pets because of their smaller size (round about 3 feet long) and the fact that serval kittens (like most kittens) are pretty damn cute. Like all the other wildcats, the cuteness fades. While the adult cats are still beautiful, they turn out to be much more than the owner bargained for: they can be very aggressive towards humans and other pets, and they are difficult to control (able to jump about 9 feet in the air). So, needless to say, they end up in places like the Wildcat Sanctuary which is a much better home (still not as good as the wild).

Mix It Up

In the interest of not putting all the tiger photos together, here's something a little bit different. This is Diablo Guapo (Handsome Devil), the sanctuary's black jaguar. This is probably the photo that recieved the most time as far as editing is concerned, it took a while to remove fencing and other unnecessary noise from the background, and some more to get the effect just right. I like the two dimensional effect of this one, it hardly seems like a photograph at all.