I grew up in northern Europe so to me this is a red deer stag roaring but on the other side of the Atlantic ocean you might see it as an elk bull bugling. Very similar species, the most striking difference to me is the noise the males make: red deer do produce an imposing roar whilst elk have their surprising bugle sound so high-pitched for such a big animal. Another difference is that red deer are generally a redder colour hence my confidence of which one this is.
But it doesn't matter. It can be whatever the viewer sees it as. Like the land the deer is walking through. It is a photograph of weathered paintwork on an old corrugated metal fence. The paint has cracked and peeled away from the metal base in vertical stripes that remind me of woodland but then the pattern in that metallic grey looks more like rock. A woodland of rock-trees perhaps or maybe it is best to see it as just a sense of a natural place.
I like the composition here which kind of fits with catching a brief glimpse of an animal as it wanders passed. The head is partially obscured and almost out of the picture as if I only just managed to get my camera up in time. There is also that slight hint of its breath in the air as it roars but again it is almost out of sight already. And it will disappear quickly enough if I try to follow.
Some of the weathering on this old fence is a great combination of the wearing away of thick paint layers together with more subtle fine cracking patterns which have their own layers and never-ending tonal variation. Nature taking our dull paintwork and creating art!
And this is what the photograph looks like without the stag and rotated back to its original orientation.
This stag was wandering within the weathered paint near the top of this fence just to the left of the blue telegraph post.
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