This young buck whitetail deer was recently photographed with his new antlers covered in velvet. We don't normally pay much attention to the smaller bucks but the light on this one was attractive. The lighting was difficult, though, and required much patience as the buck moved through the woods. The overhead canopy was very thick and allowed for small shafts of early morning light to penetrate. This image was taken when the buck paused in one of the shafts of sunlight. The deer looks well lit but in reality the light was not very strong. Much of the side of his face is in shadow but the light falls nicely on his forehead and gives us a nice catchlight in his eye. We like how he is looking somewhere in the distance with his ears alert. The whiskers on his chin are visible against the darker background. We would prefer that the spots of blue sky were not present behind the buck's head but maybe fixing that could be a Photoshop project.
1/100 second at f/5.6, 100-400 lens at 380mm, ISO 2000.
2 comments:
It is a good bet that a lot of people probably have never heard of something called deer antler velvet. For those that do know what it is, they know that it is a substance that is extracted from the cartilage of the antlers of male deer?
Deer velvet
Thank you for explaining this. I'm not sure it is correct to say that the velvet is actually extracted from cartilage, though. The velvet is a hairy skin that covers the cartilage during antler growth. In the early fall the soft tissue is converted directly to bone by the deposition of minerals. The velvet skin dries up and sloughs off and/or is rubbed off.
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