There are few better pursuits in life than grabbing your camera and striding into the great outdoors to immerse and engage in the natural world. The drive to get the shot can become maddening, obsessive. With no centralised industry resource on what is and isn’t acceptable, moral boundaries can blur to the point of illegality. Opinions on how to behave as a wildlife photographer, wildly differ. Lines are drawn, choices are made.
Photographers can’t all be expected to be experts in animal behaviour but do have a duty of care. A deep love of nature is paramount, every life form treated with equal importance: invertebrate, amphibian, reptile, bird or mammal. Nature stories need to be told and great photographs can still be achieved within ethical confines. If you’re asking yourself uncomfortable questions about whether your approach to photographing a subject is ethical, then it most likely isn’t. You have to learn to tread carefully.
Live baiting
Should live bait be used for the purposes of photography, are you even a wildlife photographer if you do? The industry swell is to reject live baiting – photography shouldn’t mean the death of an animal. The Wildlife Photography of the Year (WPOTY) rules state: Live baiting is
