A deer with antlers stands behind a wire fence at night, illuminated by a bright light against a dark background. Tall grass is visible in the foreground.

For her latest project, photographer Lauren Grabelle turned to an unusual instrument: a cheap trail camera with a plastic lens she bought from Walmart.

Grabelle lives in the backcountry of Montana and purchased a Campark T150 trail camera to check in on her ‘exciting’ neighbors, namely grizzlies, mountain lions, black bears, and coyotes.

But she soon realized that an animal with more predictable behavior might be better suited as a subject. “So deer it was,” Grabelle tells PetaPixel.

A ghostly, glowing silhouette of a deer stands in a dark, misty landscape. The image is ethereal and blurry, with soft white light illuminating the deer’s head and antlers against a shadowy background.

Close-up, black-and-white image of a rabbit’s face, focusing on one large ear and one wide eye, with the rest of the rabbit partially out of frame against a dark background.

A black and white photo shows a deer with antlers standing beside a wire fence, gazing across an open field bordered by leafless trees and evergreens under a clear sky.

“Deer Diary is a continuation of my searching for that place where fine art, documentary, and wildlife photography meet in the Montana landscape,” Grabelle writes in her artist statment. “Turning my attention from predators to prey to make these spiritual self-portraits, I chose a trail camera as my portal: the deer themselves became my collaborators by their diurnal and nocturnal movements through the landscape. Setting up the trail cam in places where their movements are already written into the earth via game trails and bent fence lines, I am able to capture these neighbors and creatures as they traverse the landscape and tell their own story – a story told in art, mythology, religion, and literature, on almost all the world’s continents since Paleolithic times.”

A deer stands in the middle of a grassy field at night, illuminated by a beam of light that cuts diagonally across the dark background. The deer’s eyes reflect the light, creating a glowing effect.

A sepia-toned image shows the lower legs of a large animal, likely a horse, suspended in midair above a grassy field with trees in the background and a partly cloudy sky overhead.

The fine art and editorial photographer would check the camera footage each morning via a “clunky” app to see what it had captured. The trail camera has a solar panel and WiFi, meaning it doesn’t need to be physically attended to.

“I didn’t have to take out the card, nor look at the screen inside of it to see [the images],” Grabelle explains. “Once I realized I had a series worthy of continuing it was a joy and fun to see what private deer moments had been captured.”

A deer grazes in a grassy field under a cloudy sky, with sunlight creating a hazy, dreamy effect in the center of the black and white image. Trees line the background.

A deer with antlers is seen in a blurry, monochrome night vision image. Its glowing eyes and faint outline stand out against the dark background.

A deer caught mid-air at night as it leaps over a wire fence, illuminated by a flash, with glowing eyes and a dark background.

A blurry, ghostly image of a deer jumping over a bent wire fence at night, captured in black and white with motion blur and glowing eyes.

Grabelle’s deer photos have an ethereal aesthetic, which she partly credits to the “cheap plastic lens” and the condensation that builds up inside the trail camera.

“I got some nice bucolic images of deer and fawns in the field but when I got some of the dreamier images and then figured out how I wanted to tone them and landed on a look, it became easy to find my direction with the project,” Grabelle says.

“And editing is definitely the secret to this series, as well as moving the camera for different perspectives to see what would happen.”

During the project, she realized that the deer were jumping over the fence close to where her camera was. So she rotated it 90 degrees to get shots of bucks and does in flight.

The project has proven successful for Grabelle as it landed her first solo museum exhibition and there are more shows planned for the future.

“At my last artist talk at the Missoula Art Museum we had fun setting up the trail cam on a tripod in the library and letting folks make their own spiritual self-portraits,” Grabelle says. “That was a bit of unexpected fun too, to see those and share them with the people who came to the talk and the museum staff.”

More of Grabelle’s work can be found on her website, Instagram, and Facebook.

Image credits: Photographs by Lauren Grabelle