Cooler weather means more movement in the deer population. In the last month or so with the high temps we’ve had in the midwest I’ve hardly seen a whitetail anywhere. Maybe a set of ears sticking out of the bush very early in the morning, but they’ve been lying down alot.
Something told me to make a right turn on a road I don’t travel much anymore. I’d shot a couple of the tell tale orange colors in a field a few miles before the river, but zooming in on the lcd on the camera realized it was just some random stalks of corn, yellowed by the heat.
I’ve traveled the area long enough to know what spots I should approach slowly and quietly, and always at a river crossing. Such a find today! Standing 50 yds from me as I nosed around the brush was this girl. She was of course looking right at me, you can’t fool ears like that. She didn’t flinch, as I fired off 20 or 30 frames with the D3s. I took a glance down in the viewfinder at my settings and realized that I was shooting manual with auto ISO, 1/500th and to my horror f2.8. I had shot some plant life earlier in the day with a narrow depth of field and forgot to roll back to 5.6 or 7, my default ‘be ready’ scenario. I was shooting through the 70-200mm vr2 at 200mm however, and had locked a focus point right on the old girl, so no worries, she was in focus just fine. As I had stopped shooting and took my eyes off of her for a second, she decided to bolt (I probably flinched a bit) and headed up the muddy bank. I was about to shift hand position to roll the aperture up to 5.6 when a splash caught my eye and I pulled the barrel back hard on the scene with the trigger button down, just in time to catch a large fawn as she bounded across the river to follow her mom. I got some blur in the first shot of her jumping in the water (which would have been the best shot of the series) but mangaged to grab a couple frames of her as she approached the right bank, before scurrying up into the brush.
All in all, the shot at the top of this post ended up being my favorite of the day and I’ve already prepped it and put it on the Smugmug site for print orders.
Moral of the story….if something tells you to change your route, and take a right turn where you rarely do….listen! God has a way of pointing US in the right direction, YOU have got to point the camera in the right direction…….
The fawn that followed
Ed Baumgarten Photography 
Great shot and story Baument. I had a stare down with a doe last year by the river and your photo looked similar to that experience. However, rather than holding a camera, I had a fly rod in my hand and was standing in the middle of the Obey River in TN. I stood motionless and we just watched each other. She slowly made her way to the water to get a drink, watching me closely the whole time. She was relatively calm until a breeze came down the river and drove my scent to her. After that, she just calmly backed out and I went back to fly fishing with Psalm 42 stuck in my head. Didn’t catch squat…made for a great fishing trip.
— LlamaMan-BK