Fallow Deer

Bambi the Fallow Deer

I have briefly mentioned in passing a couple of times now about a new project David is working on. Although he is keeping it separate from the centre, it does have strong links with the BWC... as you would imagine, and does involve our animals in a big way. In brief, it is a children's dvd, the trailer for which can be seen on our BWC Website home page. I imagine he will ask me to do a blog post on it near it's official release, so I will mention more about it then.

As part of the project, he wants to have an accompanying book for children with basic photos and he has asked me to take them for him. So, a few weeks a go, I received a list of six animals (one for each episode of the first series) and several photos of each of these animals that he needed. A lot I already had in the back catalogue, certainly good enough for what he needed, but it made me realise I had a distinct lack of photos of our fallow deer.

Fallow Deer Grazing

So, I spent a couple of afternoons and evenings with our fallow deer, a long wish list of photos and instructions to keep it basic and not get too arty! The things on the list were things like close up of head showing ears and eyes, doe on her own, fawn on it's own, buck on his own, fallow deer grazing, fallow deer browsing etc etc

Above is one of the ones I took of a fallow grazing, and one of my favourites from the shoot.

Tail

Close up of a fallow tail. I managed to take several from different angles for all on the list, to give David options to which ones to use.

Close-up of Deer Browsing

So for a browsing fallow deer, I got a close up like above.

Deer Browsing

One further out to show the whole deer, and again from different angles to offer different options.

Deer on Hind Legs, Browsing

And even managed to get one of the deer on it's hind legs. They are obviously staged as I am sure you have all worked out already, and just out of frame on the right hand side was either Tom or Izzy holding the branch... but for a children's book it works fine.

Matt Photographing Deer - by Tom Binstead

This is a photo taken by Tom. Bambi, one of our tame fallow deer, constantly getting in the way... but she did make for a great tripod for some of the photos :-)

As mentioned above, news of this DVD will be on the main blog over the summer I would imagine. Below are some of my past favourite fallow deer photos.

Fallow Deer, Dama dama

This is one of my favourite photos of a fallow doe, I particularly like the lighting and colour.

Grazing

I told a lie... this isn't a past one, this was on the shoot the other week with Tom helping. Fish eye portrait of a fallow grazing.

From the Mist

Our master buck walking out of the mist.

Fallow Reflection

A little portrait of one of our fallow deer drinking at the ditch, showing her reflection.

Jackdaw on Buck

And this is great... probably one of my worst photos technically, but still one of my favourites. It shows a jackdaw pulling the fur from the back of our buck while he was moulting, to take it away for nesting material. Great behaviour, and hopefully I will be able to document it better over the coming years.

Thanks for looking