Deer in the Yard
Be Prepared for the Unexpected
I’ve always been a proponent of the theory of carrying a digital camera everywhere you go, because you’ll never know what you’ll find. I wrote a short chapter about that in Essential Digital Photography Tips and Techniques.
Here, we have a good example of why photographers, thats us, need to be prepared at all times. Capturing the unexpected should be part of the repetoir. Here’s my example. Yesterday afternoon, while writing updates for our Top 100, a deer happend to visit my backyard. Quick to grab one of my cameras, in this case, my Nikon D80 had my Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR attached.
Not to scare off the doe, I had to quietly slide open the kitchen window which faces the yard, and I shot this deer (with my camera) handholding the camera. Thank goodness for the vibration reduction of the lens, even set at F/2.8, there was just not enough light for a sharp image. Without the VR, I never would have been able to pull this off before the deer decided to proceed on with its day.
When you’re shooting in a fast-paced situation, and you are limited to the angles and lighting conditions where you can shoot, you have to make best of the situation. Here, I was very limited. I couldn’t shoot from any other angle except from my kitchen window. The lighting conditions were mediocre at best.
Now that I had the shots downloaded to my computer, I came up with the best one. Composition wise, this image was lacking. I didn’t like the tree appearing to be sticking out of the backside of the doe. Hence, a little creative cropping, and I transformed this image into a head shot.
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