f/8 and be there

The old adage "f/8 and be there" is a great one, reminding us the most important ingredient of a good photograph is actually taking it, and letting go of all of the technical considerations. A case in point is this image.

I took this during the big snowstorms of 2010 and think it is a pretty successful image. From a technical perspective, it has a lot of problems. First and foremost, it is a pretty heavy crop of the original image, below.


As you can see, the deer by itself is only a small portion of the original, weighing in at only 586x878 pixels. That's only half a megapixel!

Another problem is that I made the shot hand-held from the inside of my house, through a double-paned window. Talk about a crappy lens!

There are a lot of things I would like to change about this image. It could have been a lot bigger with a 30 megapixel camera. It could have been sharper if I had used a tripod and a better lens. I didn't have any of these, but I managed to capture an image I like enough to print and hang on my wall!