If you haven’t read my Trail Camera post feel free to have a look.
Those were all taken with an automatic trail camera and, for what they are, I think they’re really good. They can’t compare, however, to photographs taken by a skilled photographer. The following were taken by wife with a decent camera.
I love watching deer and Ms Jodi does too so after Christmas I put up a feeder to get the deer to come in. I originally used one of those “magic” deer collector feeds that cost about twice the price of feed corn. In order to stretch the expensive feed I mixed it with corn at a rate of about half corn and half magic feed. The first few deer to approach the feeder loved the stuff! They had so much fun separating the expensive feed from the cheap corn and stomping the expensive stuff into the ground. It wasn’t long before they had all of their little friends over help.
Not wanting to waste money since they weren’t eating the expensive feed I replaced it with pure corn. When we polled the deer about how they liked the food without the discarded “expensive but fun to stomp food” here’s the response we got:
There are a couple of family groups that come, sometimes they all converge at once as above but mostly it’s one group or the other.
Both have yearling deer with them and one has a young fawn that hasn’t been without his spots for long. Here’s one of the yearlings (essentially any deer over 1 year old).
Here’s a shot of mother and son browsing together. In some of the photographs you can see my feeder off to the left. The deer will eat directly out of that if forced to but they really prefer to have it spread on the ground. My daily chores include keeping the feeder full and tossing out several handfuls of corn for dinner.
For those that are thinking that the skill in taking these photographs is mostly built into the camera. Not so. For contrast here’s a picture that I took with the same camera of the same deer from nearly the same spot that she uses. Sad isn’t it?