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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