Folks Do not Consider This Smartphone Wildlife Photographer’s Images are Actual

Logging into his profile on the 35 Awards picture competitors, Steve Scott Grogin acquired a notification telling him his picture of an alligator’s eye had been disqualified from the Mobile Phone class. The purpose? The organizers believed it had been taken with “professional camera equipment.”

Grogin tells PetaPixel that’s not true, and he shot the picture the identical method he shoots the remainder of his work: with a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra utilizing Samsung Expert RAW format.

Grogin makes use of an extendable selfie stick paired with a Bluetooth distant shutter launch to seize water-level pictures of alligators, frogs, snakes, moths, bugs, and swamp species.

“I position the phone remotely at very low angles, often close to the surface or near the subject while keeping myself farther back to reduce disturbance,” Grogin, who shoots in Florida and Michigan, says.

“A big part of the work is fieldcraft: finding wild subjects, understanding their behavior, approaching carefully, and using the small size of the phone to get perspectives that would be extremely difficult with a traditional camera body and lens. I shoot in Samsung Expert RAW and keep the original RAW files for verification.”

It’s useful that he does as a result of Grogin says folks have accused his pictures of being faux, AI-generated, or shot with a standard digicam as an alternative of a cellphone. “I understand why,” he says. “Because the perspectives can look unfamiliar at first glance.”

PetaPixel asks Grogin about one picture particularly: an alligator household all piled on prime of one another, which does look barely uncanny. He despatched PetaPixel the 200-megapixel, 16-bit RAW file for inspection; there’s nothing untoward.

Grogin says that his work is constructed round actual wildlife encounters and doesn’t do captive setups. “In a way, the accusations have become part of the story: the images look unusual because the phone allows access to positions and perspectives people are not used to seeing in wildlife photography,” he says.

But regardless of some accusations of trickery, Grogin has been rewarded in worldwide images competitions, together with the 35 Awards, wherein he ranked within the prime 100 for cellular and wildlife images.

More of his work might be discovered on his website and 500px.

Image credit: Photographs by Steve Scott Grogin