Sharing Secrets

One of them had its head turned in against the other’s ear in a way that looked exactly like gossip, and the two of them held it long enough for me to work. We were inside about thirty feet. Nara’s deer will let you get that close because they’ve lived alongside visitors for generations, and they’re treated as sacred here, which is why nobody has ever thinned them out.

I made it black and white because of what was going on behind them. The deer were standing in shade and the background was full of dappled sunlight that came out as bright yellow-green blobs once it went soft, and in colour those blobs took over the frame. Monochrome puts the attention back where I wanted it and does something better for the tree roots in the foreground, which were half the reason I stopped — all that knotted texture reads far more clearly without colour competing with it.

We didn’t feed these two, though we fed plenty of others that day. You buy the crackers from stalls around the park and the deer know exactly what the transaction is. Some of them bow for it, very politely. Others are considerably more direct.

This was a day trip out of Kyoto on our last day in that city.