The guide had already announced that in the apple plantation we would pass through on our walk from the visitor center into the nature reserve, there would be a high likelihood of seeing some Roe Deers. We did see some far away on our way into the area, but only on our way back we also encountered the one he had described as being an “albino deer”, albeit without red eyes.
They were relatively tame, because according to him they “knew the plantation was fenced, and no dogs or humans would leave the path”, and these two actually had no trouble with me getting down low, setting up the tripod and taking some dozen pictures through the mesh wire fence.
Now, how did I compose? Well, obviously I placed the albino (well, it is just really light-colored) out of the center to the lower right, and made sure that I had a nice framing using the plants. Once I had it framed I snapped some pictures, being nervous that I do not get it into focus… I still have not yet fine tuned the Sigma 100-300/f4 I am using using the new manual focusing feature of my D300. This proved to be not a problem at all, and the sharpest images are those where I placed the autofocus point on the ear of the deer using the multi-selector control.
Then, another deer passed through the frame, and I snapped some more images with it in different poses, walking, standing, checking. I liked the presented image best because I didn’t have one where the two interacted – and only that would make it successful for me. Now in this one, both interact with the photographer, and thus the viewer.
The next challenge was, that I knew I could not possibly get both into focus. Now at home I can check the DOFmaster, and estimate the range of the closer of the two at probably 20 meters, which results with the selected aperture of f/5 (get a fast shutter speed when doing wildlife! This gave me 1/500s at ISO 400) in a depth of field of only 88 centimeters, clearly not enough. If I had stepped down to f/22 I would have had 4 meters, which could (just) have sufficed, but of course exposed me to the danger of motion blur at about a 1/25s I would have ended up with. I actually did try quickly an f/10 with 1/100s (not knowing in the field that it would also just give me 1.77 m, still not enough), but discarded that as also not being sufficient after a quick check on the display.
So knowing I had insufficient depth of field, I had snapped a second frame very quickly, focusing on the second deer.
Now looking at both images, I like the one with the focus on the lower right deer better, but still my eyes keep jumping to the second, and being disappointed that it is not sharp. Obviously I have two competing subjects, and one of them is out of focus, ruining the image.
Solutions? Either take a frame with only the first deer, or next time use the large aperture to get both in focus. Workaround? Fix it in Post Production!
I have used the free program CombineZP in this case. I read about, but did not try, Helicon Focus, which is a commercial software package for the same applications.
Wow, you say, that worked well. And so easy! Not quite. If you could see the 12 MP version of the image I of course did not upload, you would clearly notice that I did focus on each of the two deers, but as I have only two shots I have none focused on the grass between them. It is not immediately apparent (if at all) in the screen resolution version, but this nic prevents this image from being used at full res. So next time I try this, I should remember to make a nice focus series including the distances between the two subjects. Learned something again 
Related posts:
Photoblogs.com