A picture worth a thousand words? Not so fast, my friends ...

In the middle of this photo, in the grass just in front of the porch, you can make out the fawn trotting off, while one of her brothers has almost exited totally, stage right.

With all the recent advancements in digital photography and nearly every cell phone on the planet now capable of capturing still photos and video, it continues to amaze me that every single shot of the Loch Ness Monster is blurry and dark.

Every photo of a reported Sasquatch looks like it was taken at midnight with a Kodak Brownie camera by someone more nervous than Don Knotts.

Every picture of a supposed UFO is always out of focus, out of range and out of this world as far as clarity and usefulness.

For crying out loud, the Sunday Snapshot photos on Channel 8 each weekend are beautiful, clear and taken by Hoosiers from every walk of life. They aren't professional photographers with expensive equipment.

Can't a single, responsible person encountering one of these mysteries of the universe ever fire off one lousy shot that is crystal clear, crisp of color and focus and void of dark shadows and iffy conditions?

Is that too much?

Apparently it is.

And just the other day in the heart of Greencastle, I realized why that happens.

Heading home to take the dog out on my lunch hour, I was cutting through town to take College Avenue north to Shadowlawn and up to North Jackson Street when traffic ahead of me was stopped for what seemed like no apparent reason.

Upon further review -- unlike the pretend NFL officiating crews -- I saw the error of my ways. There in the street ahead of me were three little deer. One, clearly a spotted fawn, was trailing what appeared to be two slightly taller male siblings.

For a moment they were motionless alongside the Hayes Murphy Sharp Insurance office before ambling off into a front yard east of there.

Instinctively, I reached for the Banner Graphic digital camera on the front seat beside me. I tried to fire a shot, but like Davy Crockett at the Alamo, my weapon jammed. I fired blanks. It helps, of course, to actually turn on the camera when you intend to use it.

But this was in haste, mind you, and it might as well have been Bigfoot running toward the bushes of the stately old house to the east for all my photography luck.

Realizing the error of my ways, I flipped the on switch and fired again. Of course, the setting was most recently for indoor flash photography so that picture came out darker than night.

So once more I fired as the three deer (incidentally, I have come to call them Doe, Ray and Me) scampered away.

The result is the crummy, overexposed photo posted with this blog. It too bright and too dark in spots, taken at a lousy angle through the windshield of my Jeep.

But I think, if you squint just right, you can see Bigfoot there on the right, crouching in the bushes in fear of the UFO that just buzzed the roof of that house.

At least that's my story ... and I'm sticking to it!