The Right Place At The Right Time

Every wildlife photographer has these visions of the perfect composition with animals in nature.  Unfortunately these visions remain in the mind but all to often never come to fruition.  Our perfect composition always involved a critter standing in water with a lush border of vegetation.  An elk would be good, or maybe a deer or if we really wanted to reach for the stars it would be a Momma and newborn fawn.  Wouldn't it be just awesome if that cute little spotted fawn would be nursing?  Okay, so that was our vision but only bits and pieces ever happened.  Perhaps this would be a dream that would never end up as a digital reality.

This past weekend we spent a couple hours on a mountainside observing and photographing some young Eagles that will soon be leaving the nest.  We also captured many images of the mature eagle that sat high up in a maple tree not far from the nest.  To be quite honest that in itself is a fulfilling day for a wildlife enthusiast.  After a couple hours we packed our gear into the backpack and began the trek back to the Jeep quite happy with how the day had turned out.  We could have sat there for many more hours but there was more critters calling our name and we had another hour and a half to get there.

As we headed to our next destination we decided to take a route that our Garmin Nuvi took issue with.  Trust me when I say that's not all that unusual as we rarely take the normal route.  You would think that girl inside our Nuvi would realize that by now but she just doesn't seem to catch on.  At any rate we zig-zagged our way to our destination ignoring the constant "recalculating" coming out of our Garmin.  It actually seemed like the vocal commands were getting louder and more agitated each time we ignored the "recalculating", but  that could be our imagination.

Somewhere between point A and point B Jeanne spotted something that made her go pretty spastic and she began making sounds that I have never heard before.  As I slammed on the binders she composed herself and told me she spotted something that looked like a doe and fawn standing in the water a ways back from the road.  With gravel flying and a cloud of dust we swerved to the berm, grabbed the gear and headed back to where she spotted these critters.  Sure enough, way back in this feeder stream, stood a doe and young fawn.  We found some cover and began capturing image after image.  For quite some time I snapped away as the young fawn nursed and poked his head around.  As we captured the images that only existed in our dreams we looked at each other knowing this was the day we thought would never happen.  Yes, there are good days in the field and there are great days.  This would be a great day!

 My temptation was to use Photoshop to remove the fly on the right leg but decided that I would use the images exactly as they came out of the 5D with the exception of minimal cropping and the watermark and copyright.