Opinions

Naturalistic photography and ethics

When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. (Mark Twain)

One of the most criticized, discussed, and controversial techniques of naturalistic photography, is the one consisting in temporarily displacing a species from its habitat to insert it in a context of terrarium or aquarium, to perform otherwise impossible shootings, sort of...

Think of the magical micro-world of a pond with very turbid water, and low muddy floors: how can you possibly capture the life of its inhabitants, like, for eaxmple, amphibians, without adopting these strategies?

My first pictures of this kind date back to about twenty years ago, I remember well the already outdated Canon ftb and the small manual flashes, which I didn’t know how to position to avoid reflexes on the glass panes, the difficulty of faithfully reproducing an underwater habitat, and many other problems. Since then, my desire to attempt shooting this kind of images directly in the natural environment never faded out. This year, thanks to the collaboration with the Ente Parco Foreste Casentinesi Monte Falterona e Campigna, which granted permission to dive, I have partially realized my dreams: I indentified a large pond, not too murky, in which three of the four species of newts present in Italy reproduce, and I tried to shoot ths kind of pictures. I used an Easydive housing with a dome port for both wideangle and macro, with a cold water wetsuit, I not

only protected myself but also, thanks to the high buoyancy of the suit (without weights), I managed to avoid touching the floor, and so muddying the water. The macro pictures were disappointing, because we are used to shoot them in a controlled - or captive - situation, with a much higher quality than we can get in a natural context. The pictures shot with the wideangle, instead, were rather gratifying, also because when I searched the web for similar images I could not find anything comparable, at least in similar underwater conditions.

The technical and logistic difficulties were not small: newts are not very confident, being approached by a photographer with wetsuit, mask, fins, and a giant housing, doesn’t seem to be their favorite sport, you have to be fast, very fast, and with a macro lens this is almost impossible. With the wideangle, I would shoot without looking in the viewfinder, but just stretching my arm and composing the picture rather empirically, using as reference the reflection well visible on the dome port. So, quick action is mandatory.

Even at dusk, illuminating the field of view with a lamp, macros gave a poor result. I believe that adding to a photo reportage on newts pictures shot in a natural environment is a novelty in the editorial landscape. Although using tubs or similar is still indispensable, mixing the two techniques is a step forward in the ethics of reportage. So, captive images in artificial environments must definitely be declared as such, but also natural shots must always be attempted and presented as well, in order to offer to the reader a complete and realistic account not only of the biology of the species, but also of the shooting techniques adopted.

Fabio Liverani