An awesome park and awesome cats, Markus. Love the eyes!
Nice repost Robert...sharpening bordering on 'crunchy' on the nose for my tastes. I agree on lightening the cheetah. If we were to shoot everything with the "
light available" and have dark images, then camera makers can just as well remove the spot metering mode from the camera

.
The point (for me at least) has always been to expose the tonal range correctly - ie having white whites and dark blacks, with nice even midtones. Obviously you cannot alter how the actual light hits the subject, but the job of the photographer is to 'manipulate' his tools (lens, camera, etc) to expose the subject correctly by sacrificing ISO/aperture/SS. In Markus' OP you can see it's too dark because the chest needs to be closer to white, and the midtones of the face are very dark. The reason we use sophisticated camera equipment is to be able to make the most of a scene like this. Given that the most of the BG is also in the shade, I would have shot this with +0.7 or even more exposure bias
so that you don't have to brighten it in PP...
