Image of stranded humpback whale wins Ocean Photographer of the Year award

Ocean photographer Craig Parry is used to capturing nature at its finest.

One of his most well-known pictures is an underwater selfie with a whale snapped within the water off Tonga.

However, it is a putting drone picture of a stranded humpback on a seaside in northern New South Wales that gained him a prestigious Ocean Photographer of the Year award.

“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 stated.

“I just wanted to show what my community were doing. So, it was mixed emotions.”

It was the early hours of July 1 this yr when Mr Parry, who lives in Byron Bay, obtained a name in regards to the whale beached at Lennox Head.

Soon, folks from Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), and SeaWorld Marine Rescue had been all on the scene.

For 15 hours, members of the neighborhood rallied collectively on Seven Mile Beach to try to save the stranded humpback.

“It’s one of those things that really brought the community together, especially up on the Northern Rivers,” Mr Parry stated.

“We’re actually environmentally aware and we respect the wildlife round us.

“And that was the particular half the place you may simply see everybody working collectively as a workforce, and you may see with everybody the fervour they’d, they usually wished this animal to outlive,” Mr Parry added.

Sadly, it didn’t.

“When you consider animals or whales, particularly, which were beached, they don’t seem to be there as a result of they’re wholesome.,” Mr Parry stated.

“When whales get on the seashores, they weigh 40 tons.

“And so, you can imagine being sort of suspended in water then having all that weight pressed on their chest.”

For the primary time within the competitors’s historical past two Australian photographers gained first place of their classes.

Two Australians amongst finalists

Mr Parry’s Stranded gained the Human Connection class, whereas Melbourne photographer Marcia Riederer positioned first within the Fine Art class.

Her picture of a dwarf minke whale was photographed on the Ribbon Reefs, a part of the Great Barrier Reef.

These two footage might be amongst 112 finalists and winners of the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 on show on the Australian Maritime Museum from Wednesday.

The total winner was a putting picture Indonesia-based macro skilled Yury Ivanov of two tiny critters generally known as the “ladybugs of the sea”.

The miniature marine creatures, amphipods from the Cyproideidae household, measure simply three millimetres in size.

Mr Parry’s entry was not the one one to point out sea creatures in misery.

Second place within the Conservation (impression) class options useless sharks in an anchovy fishing internet.

Taken in Indonesia, photographer Daniel Flormann stated the entangled creatures and the “whale shark’s injured caudal fin both tell stories of human impact”.

Mr Parry repeatedly sees migrating species caught in drum strains and nets which might be “really not getting the target species they’re after”.

“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 stated.