Animals patience pays off

Luke

Legend
Location
Milwaukee, WI USA
Name
Luke
I usually walk the dogs around 6 o'clock every night that I don't work. This coincides with when the deer start to stir and think about feeding...they are most active at dusk and dawn. So I've been bringing my camera along on the dog walks more religiously. Of course, it's just blind luck if I'll see one. And more luck if the dogs will keep from freaking out. And then even more luck if he can keep them still enough on leash and still be able to operate the camera controls while shooting something that is shy, twitchy and usually 20-70 yards away (in a dark woods).

Usually I hear some movement first that gives away their position. Tonight, I heard nothing. But as I scanned through the trees for something other than green, I spotted something.......
14725966241_cdf8743830_b.jpg
i could have easily missed it by Luke Lavin, on Flickr

She (or he) was pretty close.....maybe 20 yards away. But there was a fair amount of vegetation between us and I think she felt comfortable that she had an escape route behind her. I never approach wild animals. I just stood and watched and occasionally tried snapping a few shots. I had the camera set on Auto 800 ISO, but at f5.6 at 100mm they were all coming out blurry...some from me, some from her movement. I changed the setting to auto3200 and while I was looking down at the camera, she had moved away. And then I saw her....she was walking closer and out of the woods and crossing the paved path. I had an unobstructed view. The dogs must have been as in awe as I was.....they weren't making a peep. She was now probably 10 yards away....maybe less. Snap, snap, snap. Here's the best one I got. Then it was time to keep moving and let her be.

14542503269_c91bf08dab_b.jpg
that awkward age by Luke Lavin, on Flickr
 
Very nice Luke. I went into Flickr and viewed it at the largest size posted and there's a lot of really nice detail too in her coat and around her face. Pretty cool shot to have...

-Ray
 
I have a question. In the "hidden" shot, it is pretty obvious that you have the fawn's head fairly well in focus and the foreground foliage is out of focus.

Did you manually focus or use some other technique to accomplish that?

cheers, Jock
 
The AF point was small enough that by carefully aiming between the foreground leaves, I was able to hit the fawn (or at least some foliage on the same focal plane). If that hadn't worked, I wasn't going to switch to MF (with a camera I didn't know AND two dogs on leash keeping one hand busy). In the past when I can't grab focus through the trees, I estimate the distance and find something else around the same distance and then focus and recompose. It's not always ideal, but with small sensors, there's more room for error.
 
Nahhhh - the largest size isn't that huge and I didn't see the ugly noise, just some nice detail. I think that size would be about full screen on my 27" Mac display at home, so that's how I'd usually view it, rather than on the little MacBook I have here at the shore...

-Ray
 
oh good.... you didn't look at the largest size. It is 3800 x 2500.......or is that considered small for you now. ;)

I'm sure I deserve this for any number of past and ongoing sins, but my standard of "pixel peeping" honestly is how something looks when it fills the screen of my 27" iMac monitor. Which something with a long horizontal edge of about 2800 pixels seems to do really nicely, so that size was the basis of my comment. If it looks good on that, it's gonna look good at any size I'd ever print it, so that's my standard of judgement. On my own stuff, if I'm really going deep into the Nik filters, I will sometimes check it at the pixel level to see how well it's holding up under my processing shenanigans, but for a finished image about 2800 pixels is as deep as I go because that's what it roughly takes to fill my monitor. I don't think I saw 3800 x 2500 among the options, but, nope, not too small... :cool:

BTW, I like this more recent shot too, and I haven't seen it any larger than on my iPad on the forum!

-Ray
 
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