I've talked about this face to face with a few herp enthusiasts so I thought I'd post this question here because I'm curious what people think.
Is it really necessary to catch vipers for photography?
My opinion is that it is not and I often wonder why people do it. Because of their behavior vipers are fairly easy to approach close enough (especially with nowadays technology, i.e. photo lenses) to get great photos without having to touch them. And if you don't succeed the first time around you are most likely to have a second (or a third, fourth, etc.) chance because as most of you know they seldom stray away from their favorite basking spots. All you have to do is stick around for a few minutes.
The way I see it, there are many benefits of not catching them - less stress for the animal, avoiding risk of harming the animal (e.g. incorrect handling by the tail, broken fangs (if it bites into gloves), etc.), avoiding risk of harming the photographer, more natural photos and so on...On the other hand I don't see what benefits it brings to catch them photography and other-wise? The result is numerous photos of vipers (here and elsewhere online) which all look more or less the same, i.e. a stressed, coiled snake, in a tense ready-to-strike position. No offence to anybody but no matter how good a photographer is, how nice the light is or how beautiful the snake is after seeing hundreds of those photos it gets really boring. This is the reason why when I see a post with such photos I tend to just quickly scroll through them without paying much attention...I've just seen it soooooo many times.
What do you think?