The Birds

Once upon a time in the pre-digital age, I preferred black and white...until I learned to work with color. With some exceptions, colors, both muted and vivid, are usually what I love. Yet working on a decorating project involving my imagery of birds, black and white provided the kind of standardization that it needed. Here are some of them:

Saying "Yes" to Deer

There is a man who gets visited by squirrels. He started photographing them and even seems to make some kind of a living from it, according to his magazine write-up.

I get visited by deer.

I won't give them little umbrellas for photo-ops like he does. However, I've decided that while I live in the Middle of Nowhere, I might as well document them, even though they're not wolves, or bears, or anything else equally menacing to suit a badass lady such as myself. After all, this fits my photographic seeing-the-beauty-in-the-everyday mentality.

I even recognize some of them, like the trooper female deer who's somehow gotten injured months ago and hops on three legs, yet somehow keeps going.

So you might be seeing a lot of regular, but not average white-tailed deer (and some mule deer, too). Enjoy the cuteness, like this youngster!

P.S. I still need to befriend some ravens or crows to balance out this equation!

Blending In

Here is another image for my growing white-tailed deer collection—a common, but graceful animal.

This particular deer wasn't even spooked by my dog—so much so that I could film this fun little timelapse of her, after getting the above capture, without a smartphone telephoto lens!

One of a Kind

Almost.

Every photographer knows that it takes dozens of shots, on average, to get the perfect one. Sometimes hundreds.

So whenever an exception—an exception that proves the rule—comes along, you remember it. This afternoon, I noticed some deer outside and captured three photographs before they noticed me and took off running.

Just three.

This is one of them, and I must say I'm more pleased with the composition of this image than I sometimes am in those "average" cases I describe above. The positioning of the deer, the turn of its neck, the blurred lines of the tree branches intersecting the space diagonally, even the tiny, but striking bits of color against the gray and white of the newly fallen snow—it all seems to work.