I don’t have a lot of photos to show right now, but I’m still going to split them off into two posts, partially because they represent two separate time periods and subject matters, and partially because I haven’t been posting much and driving up the numbers justifies, um, something…
So, last night.
In doing my semi-regular nightly patrol, I was well aware of eyes reflecting the headlamp from just over the fence, but realized there were a lot of them – this is actually only half of the herd, since some of them started wandering off nervously as I played with the camera settings and removing the flash diffuser to have enough light. These are, naturally, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus,) and this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen a herd of them sleeping just outside the back fence of Walkabout Estates. It is also not the first time that I’ve realized they were all bucks, all roughly the same age, which to my knowledge (and those of several people I’ve spoken to about it) isn’t typical; bucks tend to break off on their own to find their own does. But it’s Pride Month, isn’t it? So maybe that has something to do with it…
This is at 35mm focal length, by the way, so looking notably wider (and thus further off) than I actually was, roughly ten meters.
Now, autofocus is certainly out of the question in the dark, even with the headlamp, so I was forced as always to manually focus on just the bright reflections from their eyes, which tends to be more miss than hit for truly sharp images. Though that’s not what I’m showing here and I was focusing on a different part of the frame for this one, but you can just make out the ear tag on this buck, and it reads, “78.” I include this because, in April, I got a similar frame in the same location.
Better now? The deer are relatively complacent in the area, even though I was quite close, but a) I’m pretty much silent when I’m out there, just the sounds of my footsteps and I’m endeavoring to keep those as minor as possible, and b) the bright headlamp partially blinds them and keeps them from fully realizing that it’s a human only a handful of meters away. Still, I know my arms and the camera get into the beam from time to time, so there are clues for them to figure it out. All that aside, take note how much the antlers have grown in just two months.
The sharpest one (of the deer, anyway) from the evening, and yes, he’s snacking on something as he looks at me. Not one of them bolted off, or even seemed to be walking fast – they just felt that something was happening too close and discretion might dictate they maintain a little more distance. I soon switched to pursuing other subjects and they settled back down in a new position beyond the fence, just a few meters from where they’d been – this is a semi-regular thing with them, but most times I’m set up for macro work when I’m out at night, with the wrong lens and the macro softbox attached to the flash, which I’d removed for these.
You know, this kind of shooting:
The Brood XIX cicadas had emerged some weeks back, filled the air with their peculiar song, and are now only able to be found as stray body parts here and there, but now it’s time for the annual cicadas to emerge, and this is the first I’ve seen. Often enough, they come out when rain has softened the ground, but that wasn’t happening here – it’s been quite a while without rain, perhaps long enough that they can just shove aside the dust that used to be soil. I expect to start hearing the ‘standard’ cicada song within a few days, and since I had no luck finding one of the Brood XIX laying eggs, maybe I’ll get lucky with this wave. We’ll see.