Motherhood -- Mountain Gorilla and infant

I expected photographing the mountain gorillas in Rwanda to be the highlight of my trip to Africa. I also knew that we only were going to have two one-hour visits with the gorillas, and after the first day didn't yield any shots that I really loved, I got little sleep before the second day worrying that the trip would be a bust. Fortunately, we had great luck on the second day, getting led to a research group of 24 gorillas which tourists usually don't get to see, and the group had three silverbacks and this mama with a two-week old infant. After being told that mothers with infants stay as far from human visitors as they can, thirty minutes into our hour with them, she amazingly sat down fifteen feet away and cuddled the infant, later nursing it (with the sun out, unfortunatly -- not the best light for gorilla photography). I took this shot full-frame with my 1Ds, 70-200mm at 105mm, 1/100, f5, ISO 100. At the end of this hour, I got my favorite photo of the entire trip, which will be posted another day.