Re: ***Official Ants Photography Thread***
Very nice photos. Not sure what to make of the feeding debate. I can understand both sides to it. However, I'll pose my response from the perspective of sports photography. The thrill of a great action photo is that it's something you can't recreate. You have to be at the right place at the right time. It's something completely out of the photographer's hands, but it's something all sports photographers hope will happen every time they go out to shoot. The "luck" aspect of the photo is part of what makes a great photo (a small part, not a major part). Sports photographers go to an event hoping something great will happen and that they will be in a great position to capture the moment. They use their skill and knowledge of the sport or the players to "predict" what will happen at any given moment and they prepare for that anticipated moment accordingly. When it doesn't happen or if it does, but the photographer missed the shot or was in the wrong position, he has to simply shrug it off and hope to make up for it next time or learn from his mistakes to improve for the next opportunity. It's the most frustrating part of sports photography because there are no do-overs and no second chances. The moment happens in the blink of an eye and either you got it or you didn't.
I imagine that's a lot like what wildlife photographers do as well from my naive perspective on wildlife photography. So looking at it from that perspective makes me kind of think that feeding wildlife so a photographer can get a good photo is sort of like staging a great play in a sport to make a good photo. For example, it would be like artificially setting up a situation where a baseball runner will plow into a catcher just so you can get a good photo of it. The end result is a fine photo, but it was staged. The difference, of course, is that the participant in the wildlife example (i.e. the animal) doesn't know the difference whether it's staged or not and so one could make the argument that it's still a "naturally" occurring event. The animal is not behaving any differently if the feeding was a man-made event or not. However, two things (potentially) bother me about that situation:
1. It depends on how the photo is being presented. If the photographer tells everyone that the photo was essentially staged because they were feeding the animal, then that's fine. It's not deceiving the viewer in that case if the photographer is up front about it. This really would only apply to non-commercial photography. I mean if this is part of some ad campaign, then I would assume any and all artificiality was used in the making of the photo. However, if the photographer is trying to represent reality, then they need to be honest about how it was created.
2. Feeding wildlife to get a good photo is basically just kind of lazy to me. If part of what makes wildlife photography exciting is the thrill of getting a rare photo, then feeding an animal to make the rare occurrence happen is just kind of dumb to me. I'm sure the people who disagree with that will say that the hard/rare part was finding the animal in the first place and they are simply taking advantage of an opportunity or using their knowledge of that animal to take advantage of the opportunity. To me it's just sort of exploiting the animal. I'd be much more impressed if the photographer had been watching the animal for 8 hours or whatever and was there at the time and place where the animal was eating naturally. I mean put it this way, let's say a sports photographer was showing off all these amazing sports photos, but then disclosed that all of them had been created as part of shooting a movie and were staged, would you be as impressed compared to if they had happened during live action games/events? If all someone cares about is seeing interesting photos and doesn't care how they were made, then I understand they probably don't care about feeding an animal to get photos. However, part of what really impresses me in any documentation-type photo is thinking about how the photographer was able to capture a great moment in real time. What was their thought process? What put them in that specific position with that specific lens at that specific moment? It impresses me when a photographer uses their skill and knowledge to "predict" what will happen next. Feeding an animal to get a shot is not predicting anything. It's like hitting a ball off a tee and saying you made a great hit because you knew how to get to the ball field and how to swing a bat. Sure you hit the ball nice and hard, but it really doesn't impress me that much. Hit a home run off a live pitcher and then you have my attention. Hopefully that analogy makes sense.
In any case, I don't follow wildlife photography much at all, so I won't lose any sleep over that debate.
Last edited by Benny003; 03-04-2013 at 03:14 PM.
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