Hear me roar!

Just near to where we live is Woburn Abbey, it was here that we were lucky enough to watch the red deer rut in October 2011.  After a few nerves about whether we would be able to find deer on the limited footpaths we were treated to some excellent views and some close encounters.

This magnificent specimen was in full vocal flow as we walked along one of the few paths you are allowed to follow on the estate.  I loved the way he was framed by the trees and so I heavily cropped the image in the dark room to accentuate this natural framing.  I have also carried out a small amount of sharpening as I seem to struggle getting pin sharp images at range on my super-telephoto.

This was shot using my Sigma 150-500mm lens at a distance of some tens of metres at 500mm.  Even so the image has quite a large amount of wasted space, hence the crop.  It was shot at 1/160s f6.3 (perhaps a source of the soft focus) at ISO160.

If I were shooting this again I would try to increase the ISO setting to allow for a smaller aperture to try to improve the sharpness, although I am very happy with the focal length so this would have to be a small adjustment.