Sorry it has been a while since I did a blog post, so here is a brief one.
I have to admit our back garden is a total mess. I don't really have much of a green thumb, plus the fact that here in central Texas for most of the year the weather is set to "Broil" so any attempt to do any gardening or even enjoy the garden will usually result in me collapsing from heat stroke, only to be then swarmed by vampiric mosquitoes, leaving behind a dehydrated husk. OK, enough about why we don't maintain our garden.
Garden may be a mess, but it is a wildlife refuge, and that to me is a big plus. Each spring we have Does and their young in our garden for safety, but this year we saw a faun no more than 18 inches tall and freshly bathed, so we assumed newly born.
Following day we saw a pair of fauns together, so the new born had a sibling/friend. well apparently Deer are such social creatures that if a faun is 'orphaned' a doe will take it on and raise it as her own. We have decided to Call them "Josh" and "Ethan" (for obvious reasons, well maybe not obvious to a casual reader, but believe me, its an inside joke with friends that pays off in the humour department, thank you very much).
Normally I will just watch them frolic thru the garden and not try and catch a photo, but this one time it stood there almost challenging me to photograph him. So got this picture of one of them yesterday - this is obviously "Josh" cos of his little beard...

This first picture is the "as-is" from the raw file.

One of the challenges I faced after taking this picture was how to 'process' or 'tidy' it. 

Now I always photograph using RAW (I was going to say "photograph in RAW", but then realised how that could so easily be misinterpreted) to give me maximum post-processing flexibility. So the issue I faced was that since this was a nature shot I had to keep the appearance natural, but I knew that it needed a little 'tune-up' work BUT I just knew that this picture would be sensitive to adjustments and that there would be a fine line between 'perfect' and "well, it just looks fake".

So I opted to keep it simple, just raise the colour saturation a notch to bring out the Auburn colour out on his fur without bringing up too much of the green in the background foliage (that was where any over processing or 'fake-ness' would appear). Also I wanted to nudge up the contrast slightly so that the colours on the legs were more noticeable and the dappled markings would be more distinct. I hope you like the end result.

In case you are wondering, we also have Racoon's and Possum's in our back garden (Racoon cubs are adorable, they are curious and make noises like Ewok's). We have even had birds, including Cardinals, build nests in our hanging baskets. Don't believe me? Well this was one such hanging flower basket by the front door many years ago (this was with an old point-n-click camera while looking thru our front window at the Cardinal chicks)...