As several readers reminded me when I posted the Texas Desert Tortoise photo, we see a lot more than birds on our Texas photo safaris. This year we had some great opportunities to photograph Steve Bentsen's deer when they came down to drink...For those not familiar with the way most of Texas works, something like 90% of the land is private (vs. as much as 90% public in some of the other western states). So it is not uncommon to have large herds of deer on a big property. But that doesn't make them any easier to find when they don't want to be found. Quiet in the blind is the rule when you want to get a sight of mammals as they are generally much more skittish than birds about noise.
As with any drinking animal some of the most interesting photos come as they straighten back up and the water is dribbling from their mouth. In this case all I needed to do with this image from my D700 was a slight crop (maintaining the 3:2 aspect ratio using the handy Crop tool in Adobe Camera Raw), then use nik's Darken Border / Lighten Center tool to help fade out some of the distracting background. I did a quick sharpen of the face by brushing on some of nik's Output Sharpening, and then for the web posting used DigitalPro for Windows to resize, convert to sRGB and watermark using its handy Web preset. Total time was less than a minute.
As always we hope you can join us for one of our Texas trips next year. There is no telling what we'll get to photograph!--David