Oh, Deer...

This whole deer image thing began last summer when I went up to Pennsylvania to shoot some night images based on two places I lived....one as a child, and when an adult, a house in a potato farming community. While at the farm house, as I looked through the house as it was now, a new family living there, of course, the den sported a stuffed deer head on the wall. I photographed it during the daylight, and much later, when back home, I combined the image with one of me shot outside, also in the daylight, peeking from behind a barn door, and created what is known as a "day for night" image.

I didn't think much about deer again until just a few months ago when my new neighbor invited me to his house and there on the floor, awaiting their place on the wall, were two stuffed deer heads.....I'm not a hunter, nor do I find the idea of decorating with taxidermy, but over the years, deer have come to me in meditations occasionally, leading me to understand that they are my animal guides, or totems. If you want to read more about the deer as a totem you can click http://blueapples.ca/articles/animal-totem/deer/ to read about it.

So anyway, I got a visceral rush looking at them as well as being very uncomfortable knowing they were dead, but really wanted to photograph them. I called my photog friend in Richmond about what I found, and how I wanted to photograph them..... he wanted to come up and help out with the lighting.... (Thank you, Richard.)