Ocean photographer Craig Parry is used to capturing nature at its best.<\/p>\n
One of his most famous images is an underwater selfie with a whale snapped in the water off Tonga.<\/p>\n
However, it’s a striking drone photo of a stranded humpback on a beach in northern New South Wales that won him a prestigious Ocean Photographer of the Year award.<\/p>\n
“I’m always taking beautiful shots of animals that are you know, loving their environment, and when I did submit this photo, it was kind of difficult for me,” Mr Parry said.<\/p>\n
“I just wanted to show what my community were doing. So, it was mixed emotions.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mr Parry took this selfie with a humpback whale in Tonga in 2015. (Supplied: Craig Parry)<\/p>\n
It was the early hours of July 1 this year when Mr Parry, who lives in Byron Bay, received a call about the whale beached at Lennox Head.<\/p>\n
Soon, people from Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), and SeaWorld Marine Rescue were all on the scene.<\/p>\n
For 15 hours, members of the community rallied together on Seven Mile Beach to try and save the stranded humpback.<\/p>\n
“It’s one of those things that really brought the community together, especially up on the Northern Rivers,” Mr Parry said.<\/p>\n
“We’re really environmentally conscious and we respect the wildlife around us.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This image shows an aquarist holding an early-stage embryo of an Indo-Pacific leopard shark. (Sirachai Arunrugstichai – Ocean Photographer of the Year)<\/p>\n
“And that was the special part where you could just see everyone working together as a team, and you could see with everyone the passion they had, and they wanted this animal to survive,” Mr Parry added.<\/p>\n
Sadly, it did not.<\/p>\n
“When you think about animals or whales, especially, that have been beached, they’re not there because they’re healthy.,” Mr Parry said.<\/p>\n
“When whales get on the beaches, they weigh 40 tonnes.<\/p>\n
“And so, you can imagine being sort of suspended in water then having all that weight pressed on their chest.”<\/p>\n
For the first time in the competition’s history two Australian photographers won first place in their categories.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This dwarf minke whale was photographed by Marcia Riederer on the Ribbon Reefs, part of the Great Barrier Reef. (Marcia Riederer – Ocean Photographer of the Year)<\/p>\n
Two Australians amongst finalists<\/p>\n
Mr Parry’s Stranded won the Human Connection category, while Melbourne photographer Marcia Riederer placed first in the Fine Art category.<\/p>\n
Her image of a dwarf minke whale was photographed on the Ribbon Reefs, part of the Great Barrier Reef.<\/p>\n
These two pictures will be among 112 finalists and winners of the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 on display at the Australian Maritime Museum from Wednesday.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The overall winner was a striking image Indonesia-based macro expert Yury Ivanov of two tiny critters known as the \u201cladybugs of the sea\u201d.\u00a0 (Yury Ivanov – Ocean Photographer of the Year)<\/p>\n
The overall winner was a striking image Indonesia-based macro expert Yury Ivanov of two tiny critters known as the “ladybugs of the sea”.<\/p>\n
The miniature marine creatures, amphipods from the Cyproideidae family, measure just three millimetres in length.<\/p>\n
Mr Parry’s entry was not the only one to show sea creatures in distress.<\/p>\n
Second place in the Conservation (impact) category features dead sharks in an anchovy fishing net.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Second place in the Conservation (impact) category features\u00a0dead sharks in an anchovy fishing net in Indonesia. (Daniel\u00a0Flormann – Ocean Photographer of the Year)<\/p>\n
Taken in Indonesia, photographer Daniel Flormann said the entangled creatures and the “whale shark’s injured caudal fin both tell stories of human impact”.<\/p>\n
Mr Parry regularly sees migrating species caught in drum lines and nets that are “really not getting the target species they’re after”.<\/p>\n
“It is a topic that’s quite confronting for me that, you know, we have all these animals getting caught in these nets, and it’s just unnecessary to see,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ocean photographer Craig Parry is used to capturing nature at its best. One of his most famous images…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1897,103377,8798,39208,103375,14680,6487,103376,90,56,19718,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-247153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-art","tag-australian-maritime-museum","tag-exhibition","tag-ocean-photographer-of-the-year","tag-ocean-photography","tag-oceans","tag-photography","tag-photography-awards","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-underwater","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}