Wildlife photography article in BBC Wildlife (1 Viewer)

Mark Carwardine has an interesting piece on the ethics of wildlife photos in this month's BBC Wildlife. Not so much the disturbance of real wildlife - he pretty much takes the inappropriateness of that for granted - but the more subtle aspects such as baiting, a bit on how much photoshopping is acceptable and then outright fakery such as zoo photos or hired photographic models, with a side-swipe at the naff conditions some of the latter are kept in between shoots.

I use bait occasionally (more often for small mammals than for larger ones though I've certainly put stuff out for boars from time to time) but other than that I do very little. My one aberration is the attached pic of a Field Vole. It is one vole, but one shot cut the head off and the next chopped its back end off (fast moving subject) so....

What do others do/think?

John

I have no issue with any level of photoshoppery as long as it is artistic or aesthetic as opposed to altering accuracy. I guess by this I mean its fine to reinsert a head as John did, or remove a branch or something but I wouldn't be too keen on something which misrepresented the natural situation (such as photoshopping a nice picture of an atlantic dolphin or shark sp. in front of a beautiful indopacific reef background (I've seen the wrong ocean used a few times; caribbean dive resorts seem to have a remarkable number of red sea anthias in their brochures!) or so on). If people want to use models that's fine with me (as long as they're looked after) but they should declare it. To represent a shot as wild when its not is deceitful. Baiting is fine for me - as long as it doesn't harm the animal in any way I see it as no different to putting out birdfeeders.

Misrepresentation is the sin of sins, and as with stringing (is this a variety of stringing?) the motivation increases with the difficulty of the subject. It appears now that not only the dethroned Wildlife photograph of the Year but also a portfolio of Wolves that appeared in a recent BBC Wildlife may have been exposed as not truly wild work despite being advertised as such.

Honesty remains the best policy.

As for bait.... the article that prompted this thread included the deliberate release of a live mouse in front of a Snowy Owl. The result was a great pic, but a bit hard on the mouse! I was a bit startled, but then I thought of how many tanks of minnows I've seen used to get that Kingfisher shot - I never thought that was out of order.... I dunno. How far should one go?

John

Farnboro John said:

Mark Carwardine has an interesting piece on the ethics of wildlife photos in this month's BBC Wildlife.

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Biggest ethics breach of BBC is text of some articles. First, public is encouraged by beautiful films to support creation of national parks and reserves. Once its done, the first thing is kicking tourists out of these reserves, mugging incredible fees and blaming nature tourism as a threat. Nature tourism is very rarely a threat to wildlife. Almost always the threat are local people or mass tourism, and wildlife tourism is a scapegoat. Park rangers find it much easier to chase tour buses than poaching gangs, bureaucrats find it easier to close wildlife tour company than 100 of peasants cutting the forest...

Farnboro John said:

baiting

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OK for me. Otherwise, photographing a bluetit at my feeder would be wrong. Animals worldwide already live in modified habitat. It is self-delusion that eg. wild boars going to potatoes planted by a farmer are natural, but going to potatoes put by a photographer are not.

Farnboro John said:

how much photoshopping is acceptable

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For me - OK when all picture is modified the same way. So, making colors lighter, darker, contrast bigger/smaller. All this could be obtained by changing camera settings when the photo was taken. NOT: modifying part of the picture: cropping, airbrushing spots, grasses, copy-pasting etc.

Farnboro John said:

outright fakery such as zoo photos or hired photographic models

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OK if they are immediately identified as such - not in some running text at the end of the film. Actually, most such fake pictures are not zoos or models, but sick or orphaned animals in rehab centres in the wild habitat.

I would actually look more favorably at pictures of truly wild animals. Picture of snow leopard is nothing. But even grainy pictures of wild, unrestrained snow leopard are however, extremely interesting.

BTW, within 10 years it will be cheaper to produce computer-generated pictures of animals a la Jurassic Park than travelling to the jungle. Together with the trend of chasing people out of real nature, ostensibly to protect it, the danger is that the public will entertain itself with CGI films of tigers and harpy eagles and don't care that the real ones are extinct.

I will only go to photoshopping, and leave the rest for others: I agree that the goal is to not misrepresent the shot. For that reason, I am not so sure about deleting a branch etc, because in many cases, that branch (and the other annoying one next to it) is a part of the natural habitat that the bird/animal lives in. Likewise, I have a problem with someone wanting a shot of this nice flower from the grassy meadow, but then tramping down ½ meter (1½ foot) all the way around it because the grass was in the way of that perfect shot.

However, I can not get into my head why selective lightning/darkening/sharpening/noise reduction or part of a photo is wrong because it was not done to the whole photo. I am old enough that I have been in the dark chamber using negatives and chemicals, and one of the arts of the trade was to move your hands through the light to selectively darken or lighten one area relative to another. The very first book I read about the subject advised that one should shoot a whole library of cloudy skies to copy into the boring sky of that great photo that otherwise contained the grandkids playing. May I add that I never followed that particular advise, but adding things together is nothing new.

Niels

Sandwiching slides and selective adjustments were very much a part of film work so alterations are definitely not new - I remember Chris Packham sandwiching a Rhino shot with a sunset in his Wildshots tv series back in the 90's.

I think that most things (that don't harm or endanger the animal!) are ok if you don't pass them off as something they are not and that you say when you make large changes to a photograph. I'll sometimes use the computer to remove little bits of foliage poking out of the edge of the frame that look particularly distracting and have once or twice attempted to remove a twig from in front of a bird, more as an exercise than anything, but wouldn't pass it off as unedited - in fact the opposite, I think I posted one of those on BF with a before and after for comparison.

I've carried out gentle 'gardening' around flowers before, but only to remove errant grass stems across the bloom and always done very, very minimally - there's a micro-climate around each plant and I'm always reluctant to mess about with that. When I do find it needs cleaning up usually you can tuck the grass stem out of the way or if you have to cut it then it's rare you find more than one strand of grass needs removing.