Behind the Scenes: The Close Encounter
“Close Encounter”
A close-up photograph of a mature whitetail buck, NY 2020.
During the pre-dawn hours of a brisk autumn morning I sat in the woods against a large oak tree. The New York landscape was scattered with dense timber and fallen leaves, sprawling through what appeared to be endless ditches and hills. The felled foliage glistened in a pale glow, covered in a small sheet of moisture from an overnight storm. I had walked into the woods a few hours prior, and was satisfied that I had been silent and still long enough to blend with the surrounding area.
Just after dawn, a whitetail buck appeared briefly about 60 yards away walking in and out of sight. I waited for a moment where his head slipped behind the cover of the trees to lower my eye to the viewfinder of my camera, and proceeded to track him smoothly in the distance. After 15 minutes I lost sight of him, presuming he had walked down into the creek bed on the far side of the hill. Discouraged, I sat and waited patiently in the hopes that he would return to a more open area of the woods.
An hour passed, and during that time I became considerably more anxious. Although the sun was slowly rising higher above the canopy of trees, the air still felt considerably cold. As I was having the internal discussion on whether or not to pack up for the day, I caught a glimpse of him directly across from me, but this time closer. It was then that I realized I had not been paying as close attention to the landscape as I should have been, being that the only way for him to get that close to me would have been to be in my line of sight for a fair amount of time. I couldn’t move without the risk of startling him, but at the same time I had to move in order to rotate my camera back towards him. What happened next perplexed me: he started walking directly towards me, lazily nibbling at the last remaining acorns on the ground.
Each time he put his head down I moved my arm a little further up towards my camera. After several renditions of this up-and-down timed movement, I had finally grasped the camera and rotated it on the tripod, now facing the magnificent whitetail in front of me. As I slowly leaned down to put my eye into the viewfinder. The buck stood rigid, staring directly at me. He was frozen in place no more than 20 yards ahead, attempting to figure out whether he saw something more than just a tree. The sound of the shutter broke the tense silence, and the buck quickly broke off running into the thick trees with his tail held high.
