Fake Photography? What is real?

(typical hunting magazine bullshit)

In Audobon magazine a few months ago there was an article about "fake" nature photography. Essentially the story indicated that most nature photography on the cover of magazines are photographs of tame animals from game farms. Places where you pay hundreds of dollars per hour to have huge bucks, or mountain lions and other animals posed any way that you like. If you prefer action shots, for example, they might throw a ball that the lion chases while you shoot away.

If you understand "Depth of Field" and have ever hunted you can begin to pick up on this pretty quickly. Take this photograph from the cover of "Outdoor Life" magazine. The grizzly bear, which looks wild and very fierce is facing the camera nearly straight on, really at just a slight angle.

A large grizzly is about 6.5' feet long. Since that bear is at an angle, let's say there is 5 feet of this bear in the picture. At my main nature photography len's lengh (400 mm) the most of that bear that could be in focus at any one time is about 2.5 feet if the bear was 60' away from the photographer. DOF for a true nature shot can be demonstrated here...

Notice that the beaver is not entirely in focus. In fact, only it's face is.

Anyone who has ever hunted knows that it's nearly impossible to get to within 10-20 feet of nearly world record size whitetail bucks. Yet, those exact animals are photographed with tiny lenses from those short distances and placed on the cover of every hunting magazine.

If you want to know something truely disgusting, the famed nature documentary maker Marty Stoffer, who shot the series "wild america" actually used to stage nearly every aspect of his fillms, including conflicts between predator and prey. He even threw lemmings off a cliff and made it appear as if they jumped.

So when you look at my photographs you should keep in mind a couple of things.

#1. They suck

#2. I spent thousands of dollars to make these sucky photographs

#3. They are wild animals

#4. I hate it when people fake nature photographs!

#5. I sometimes go to fairly extreme measures to get my photographs, especially since I do not wish to own or drive an automobile. For example, I left my home at about 3 am, rode my bicycle pulling about 100 pounds of gear 15 miles to that nature area in order to be in my blind before daylight. A little harder than say............driving to a game farm.

Here is another example of a person that I suspect is faking their nature photographs. Notice that here there appears to be maybe 20' totally in focus, the colors are almost neon and the entire scene is too perfect, especially when you consider that with that DOF he must have been like 4' away with a wide angle lens.

Now I dont try to sell my photographs for a number of reasons, but if I did, I could never compete with something like this.

Prairie Chicken Framed

I finally pulled the trigger and got one of my chicken photographs framed. It costs me nearly $90.00 to get it double matted and framed properly, which is why I only do a couple per year. That was such an enjoyable trip, that I'm really going to like having this on the wall.