Although my primary goal when hiking in the parks with my camera is to capture interesting landscape compositions, whenever I get an opportunity to photograph wildlife I do it. I’ve captured the occasional shot of a squirrel, dozens of shots of different types of birds, and, much rarer, I have gotten a photograph of a deer. Most of the parks where I hike either have no deer or they are quite scarce. Lake Conestee Nature Preserve, on the other hand, has quite a number of deer. The only problem is that they are skittish, and I usually only see them, either far away, or after they’ve seen me and are bolting through the forest to get away from me.
When I see deer running through the forest, I sometimes fire off a few photos. But usually all I capture are blurred images. The few exceptions to that have been posted here. If you follow my “good morning” posts, then you’ve already seen those.
On this particular morning I had already heard animals running through the forest a number of times, barely catching glimpses of what were probably deer, but I couldn’t be sure. I was walking along the paved path that outlines a portion of the park when I thought I saw a flash of something up ahead to my right. I moved to the edge of the path and peered into the woods. Then, in the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something speeding across the path ahead of me.
I cautiously moved ahead, crouching, as though I might be less visible or more quiet. Kind of foolish, I know. I guess it’s just a natural reaction when sneaking up on something.
Then I saw it. It was a deer, probably not 30 feet away from me, standing in a thicket, no way to get a shot. I stepped off the path to try to get closer. As soon as my feet crunched the dead leaves on the forest floor, the deer panicked and made a run for it.
At first, I figured my opportunity was gone. Then I remembered something that I had seen a number of times before. Quite often, a startled deer will run a short distance, stop, and then turn around and look in the direction of whatever startled it. I knew the deer was already too far away for me to see clearly with my naked eyes in the thick forest. So, with no expectation of seeing anything interesting, I lifted up my camera and peered through the viewfinder, slowly panning right to left, looking for what I might see.
And there it was, that beautiful deer.
From where I stood, there were weeds and tree limbs in the way of getting a clear shot. The deer was so far away I could not tell that there were also branches right across its face. I snapped off a few shots. The deer disappeared.
When I got back home, I pulled up today’s photo on my computer to see if there was a way to salvage it. I attempted to remove some of the distracting elements from the photograph, but nothing I did made the photograph look better. The deer was quite a long distance from where I had stood, and so I had to crop in quite a bit. The oddest thing was that somehow my lens had focused right on the deer and not on the surrounding distractions. Even in the cropped photograph, the deer’s cute face, wide dark eyes, and alert ears were in focus.
The deer was looking right at me. There was something compelling about that, something that let me think that all the distracting elements would not spoil the photo. Sitting there at my computer, I tried to think of a title for the photo, something that I always do before posting. Then it came to me. I had been watching the deer, but in the photograph the deer was watching me.