Doug Gimesy’s photograph defies AI to create beautiful wildlife images

These days you could type prompts into an image generator and create something like this in seconds. But it wouldn’t be real. After shooting 100,000 frames, Doug Gimesy got his shot.

A grey-headed flying fox mother with pup flying between trees at a colony in Myuna Wetlands in Doveton, Victoria. Picture: Doug Gimesy

Let’s be frank: these days you could type a few prompts into an AI image generator and create something like this in seconds. But it wouldn’t be real; it wouldn’t be a photograph with a story ­behind it. A story of human endeavour, and the obsessive striving for perfection. Doug Gimesy made dawn visits to the flying fox colony at Doveton on 50 occasions before he finally nailed the shot he was after. As mothers with infant pups attached returned to the colony after a night’s foraging, Gimesy tracked their flights with a hand-held camera attached to a $25,000 prime lens. On each of those 50 dawn visits, he would fire off about 2000 frames. So all up it took 100,000 attempts to capture this technically very difficult photograph until, finally, he got The One: perfectly side-on, pin-sharp focus, with the pup suckling.

“After every visit I would go through all the shots and ­delete 99.9 per cent of them,” he says with a laugh. “If I ever write an autobiography I’m going to call it F..k, Nearly!”

Gimesy, 62, had a career in Big Pharma before chucking it all in a few years ago to become a conservation photographer. He and his partner recently bought a 120-acre former sheep farm near Apollo Bay that they’re rewilding: they’ve planted 6000 trees and removed 17km of barbed wire ­fencing so wildlife can cross the property safely. Koalas, echidnas and wombats are frequent visitors, and they have black-shouldered kites and wedge-tailed eagles nesting there. “The plan is to create a wildlife reserve,” Gimesy says.

This shot, a finalist in the international BigPicture ­Natural World Photography Competition, is close to his heart. He’s always loved flying foxes, which are a keystone species for our forests – they’re great pollinators, and ­disperse ­native seeds far and wide. “Flying foxes are often misunderstood, and get a bad rap,” Gimesy says. “I wanted to capture an image that shows people they’re animals that care for their young, just as we do. A picture that can touch people emotionally has a big impact.”