Ear Cleaning at Big Meadows, Shenandoah National Park

Sometimes, it’s all about the ears. The white-tailed deer mother cleaning its fawn’s ear in the bright green grass of Big Meadows, Shenandoah National Park was just too cute to not share.
 
As I have mentioned before, photographing white-tailed deer in Big Meadows is very challenging. Though I took a lot of photos in my few days there, some quickly stand out over the rest to me. In addition to the cuteness factor, I liked this frame for a couple of reasons. The first is because of the relatively evenly colored bright green grass framing and strongly-contrasting the animals – but not obstructing them. I also like the balanced overall position of the animals. And, all the eyes are sharp.
 
One of the big challenges to photographing moving animals is often keeping the proper AF point(s) selected and when an animal changes direction, the proper AF point may be on the opposite side of the viewfinder. If the primary subject’s eyes are not in focus, the image will likely end up in my recycle folder. This means that keeping the selected focus point(s) on the primary subject’s eyes is more important than maintaining ideal subject framing. Getting both right is the goal of course, but I am more likely to delete an image because the eyes are out of focus than because the framing isn’t perfect. Cropping can often solve the latter issue.
 
While I concentrated on keeping the ideal AF point selected and placed on the subjects (the doe’s nose in this case – to keep both sets of eyes in focus), the Canon EOS-1D X Mark II‘s high speed burst mode took care of catching the frame of what seems like the ideal ear position in both animals.
 
Seeing and capturing too-cute moments like this one feed the addiction!
 
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