Sika deer at sunrise

These are sika deer I photographed in Japan at sunrise on the island of Hokkaido. The challenge with this kind of picture is capturing each animal so it’s in focus. I didn’t have a lot of light, and I was using 700mm focal length –a 500mm f/4 and a 1.4x teleconverter – which not only reduced my light gathering ability by one f/stop but depth of field was extremely shallow. That meant the only way to make sure all three animals were sharp was to wait until they were all on the same focus plane. That might not have happened, but had one of the animals been less than sharp, the picture would be worthless. My settings were 1/250, f/5.6, and 320 ISO. I could have raised the ISO which in turn would have given me more dof, but at 700mm it wouldn’t have made much difference. At one moment, the three deer were huddled together and they all looked at the camera. Once in a while luck comes into play.