Hi Alec,

Sorry for the long delay. I was out pretty much all day yesterday. LOL, I am WIPED. It was a great fireworks display though - possibly the best I have ever seen.

Anyway, OK. Now that we have that piece figured out, my assumption is that your camera was set to meter on the light source behind the deer. i.e. you exposed for the bright light and not for the deer, which means that the dear got real dark. So, when exposing an image, you need to make sure that you are exposing on the object you want, and not what the camera thinks is right. This can be done a few different ways. I typically junk the 'zone metering' that is on the camera. I use a 'center weighted' meter which uses a weight towards what is in the middle of the frame. There is also something called 'spot' metering, which allows you to pick one little piece of the frame and use that as your specific, perfectly calibrated spot to meter from.

Now, in either case, this image would have resulted in a properly exposed deer, but the bright light in the back probably would have blown out. Also, depending on how dark the deer was, you may have found that the shutter speed was going to get realllly slow, meaning that if you are hand holding, it might cause shake problems. As I said, this was a tough image to pull off.

OK. Does this make sense? If it does, we can move to the actual composition itself.

James