Dead Stuff

I was once asked to identify a starfish which had been trawled up and then given to a fisheries officer. He fetched it from his freezer and after I'd told him what it was he asked if I wated a photo. I pointed out that a frosted starfish wouldn't make a terribly useful picture and he immediately dropped it into a shallow rockpool and said it would be fine - he was right - it looked great and has even been published once too! Not sure of the ethics (I DID tell the publisher.....) but as someone else pointed out, at least there was no harrassment!

But images of dead creatures certainly have thir place - I shot some of ghost netted porpoises (a mother and calf) which have been published many times and which I have allowed to be used by conservation bodies in various campaigns too.

I have been told by *. *., a well-known British diving photographer and journalist, that he took a truly stunning shot of a dead shark's face after trying to free it from a net. The glint in its eye has fooled everyone into thinking it was alive, but he thinks it was freshly dead.

It's intent that matters, I guess: frozen targets (I propose the term RAWsicles when a digital file results) are lower than fish cloned into the image, but higher than physically moving live animals about for the shot.

Do frozen targets attract sharks? Is this safe? Is unnatural feeding behaviour being created.

Tim

B)

Do frozen targets attract sharks? Is this safe? Is unnatural feeding behaviour being created.

 

Tim

 

B)

LMAO!!!

I took this pic while diving Lake Mead in 2007. Not staged. It seems the duck was diving to eat small fish around a bush and got caught in some fishing line and drowned. It had been there awhile by the time I came swimming by. :glare:

I don't want to upload the image since it's not original to me, but I got a photo as a joke with the tagline "when dads teach kids how to play with action figures". It showed two 9" tall or so GI-Joe dolls with rifles and safari gear standing in "triumphant hunter" pose with one foot on the body of a dead squirrel, which scale-wise looked like the rodent version of a Kodiak bear.

It was hysterical and I wish I thought of it. Death can be funny. But, as the dead shark photo win shows, it can also be insightful and poignant as well.

Good photography tells a story and death is a part of that story. The entrapped shark and duck are important and interesting stories to tell so it is entirely appropriate to photograph them. As are dead carcases on the seafloor, a dead mola mola being toyed with by sea lions or even human remains in a wreck.

On the other hand, misrepresenting a dead animal as a live one for convienience is just like any other photographic manipulation and simply isn't right.

Now if you kill the pig its completely acceptableand so long as you eat it afterwards.