Community’s Opinion Part 1
Welcome Back!!
Before diving into the different aspects of wildlife photography ethics, let’s first understand what exactly are these ethics? According to National Geographic photographer Beverly Joubert, “The ethics of photography are the same as the ethics of life, and all revolve around respect.” Different places and situations also create different perception on whether these practices are ethical or not. Hence, I did some research to find out how the photography community in Singapore views some of the practices in wildlife photography.
Total Survey Responses: 55
Baiting
(glitch in the form resulted in only 54 responses)
As expected, the majority of responses to the use baits is no. This might be due to the strict laws to deter baiting that is being enforced in Singapore. In 2017, a photographer was fined $3000 for using mealworms as bait to lure the birds at the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Interestingly, 35.2% of the participants feel that the use of bait is okay, with 24.1% saying it depends on the location. One of the contributing factors to it may be that, the use of bait is less heavily regulated and viewed less negatively in some other countries.
Calls
(1 being never and 5 being all the time)
The use of calls is not very popular with 58.2% saying that they do not use it at all. Even those who have used calls to attract wildlife, don’t use it very often. One hypothesis may be that the use of calls in attracting wildlife is less effective when compared to using baits.
Changing the Surroundings
Compared to baiting and the use of calls, manipulating the environment is viewed more negatively, with more of the surveyees saying it is not okay. This is probably because the effects of modifying the surroundings (E.g breaking of branches), can be seen immediately compared to the other practices. Less than a quarter of the participants feel that it is okay to manipulate the surrounding, with 18.2% of them saying it depends on the location. Certain locations may be less ecologically sensitive than others, hence this may lead people to feel that any modifications to the surrounding area will not have a big impact.
From these data, we could see that the majority of photographers do not use these tactics to get their photos and that the location can influence how the photographers feel about a certain practice. In the next blog, I’ll cover the survey of other practices, why do the respondents feel that some practices are not right and an interesting thing that happened to me during the survey!! HAHA, stay tuned!!
Hi Benjamin! As someone who was never really exposed to wildlife photography, I learnt quite a few things from this post, like how some photographers use bait and calls to attract wildlife. I always thought that photographers just go to the places where these animals are usually spotted and hope that the animals will be there HAHA. For the question about modifications to the surroundings, do you elaborating more of what that consists of? If I’m taking the picture at night and want to use strong flash/torchlight to illuminate the animal better, does it count as modification? Or if I used a leaf to move an insect to another location?
-Alicia:)
Hi Alicia!! I would interpret modifications like, placing a log and clearing away stray branches, to create a cleaner photo with fewer distractions. Usually modifications to the surrounding help the subject stand out more. Using lights/flash as well as moving the wildlife is more of a different practice. However, both points raised are also practices one might encounter too. In fact, I may go more in depth into it in my blog. Thank you!! =)
Hey!
Interesting to see what the local photography community thinks about these issues! 🙂 You mentioned in your post that some people could have picked the option “depends on the location” as some countries are not as strict about these issues as compared to Singapore. What could be some possible reasons for this? I was thinking maybe it’s because these countries could be facing bigger issues in relation to their biodiversity that such issues are not even considered a problem. Or it could be due to the fact it would be hard to reinforce such rules. Just some possibilities I thought of, what do you think?
~ Yalini
Hi Yalini. Actually, I only recently found out that some countries are not as strict about this issue compared to Singapore. Before the pandemic, a friend of mine went overseas to photograph Ospreys (Bird of prey). He told me that people were using fish as bait to lure the birds out and there wasn’t really anyone stopping them. The size of the country might be a contributing factor? Or like you mentioned, perhaps the country has other pressing issues to resolve. I will be including this factors when I go more in depth into each individual practice, so stay tuned!! Cheers =)