Monday, December 12, 2011

The High Cost of Photo Phakery


Ted Williams at Audubon says staged pictures of captive animals in pens have taken over the animal photography business, and he argues that these phony pictures give the public a very inaccurate view of nature:

Audubon has sent me to lots of wild places over the past 31 years, but I’d seen only one wolf and three cougars (a litter) until December 8, 2009. On that day, before noon in the Glacier National Park ecosystem of northwestern Montana, I encountered not just one wolf but two and not just one cougar but two! What were the chances of that?Well, they were 100 percent, because I’d rented the animals for a photo shoot

Read the whole thing here.

Some years back I discovered the "phony photography" gambit while attending an Outdoor Writer's Association annual meeting. 

Much to my amazement, my friends and I were was not as incompetent at locating wildlife as I had, up-to-then, thought. 

It seems almost every picture taken of mountain lions that is not taken by a remote camera trap or does not show a lion snarling down at hounds, is taken at a pay-to-shoot photography zoo.   

Ditto for all those wonderful photos of red fox kits tumbling out of settes, and Bobcats lounging about on stumps at water's edge.

The good news is that faked wildlife shoots are getting a little rarer. 

As I explain in the links below, and Ted Williams explains in his excellent article, that can only benefit the animals themselves.
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3 comments:

Chas S. Clifton said...

I attended the 1987 OWAA meeting in Kalispell, Montana, which is near at a couple of well-known preserves that rent time to photographers.

The owner of one of showed up with a mountain lion cub as a prop.

I had the same experience that you did—-I had honestly thought that wildlife photographers were just super-good at scouting critter behavior! Those photos of bobcats chasing snowshoe hares--taken inside a fence!

I understand why, and I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing, but no one tells the readers and viewers, most of the time.

PBurns said...

The main thing is we both got to recover a little bit of our shreded dignity ;-) You see all these great photos, and you realize these photographers have to get HUNDREDS of these great photos a year in order to make a living and they MUST be making a living at it to spend enough time out there to get these kinds of photos. And yet if you yourself take the time to spend months at a crack out in forests and clawing up mountains, you are lucky to see a few deer, a couple of moose, an elk, a fox, and a bear. A bobcat with kits? A wolf on a kill? A wolverine sunning itself next to a stream? Wow. Who are those guys getting those kinds shots?!?!! And when you find out, you feel better about yourself. My self-esteem was dramatically improved by the OWA meeting ;-)

Viatecio said...

After Planet Earth showed on TV, there was always a little behind-the-scenes clip at the end documenting the horrid conditions and sparse sightings the crews went through in order to get the footage they needed.

Now I'm not sure whether to believe them, especially when the narrator says something akin to "Never before seen in the wild, here is the first-ever snow leopard hunt caught on camera."

A small part of me wants to say that they were truthful and they did go through a whole lot of what Mother Nature threw at them to get previous seconds or minutes of video, though. That show is way too good to throw away on gneral principle like that.