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Shooting the Loch Ness Monster

Photography can be a tough job when the weather turns bad and your model won’t cooperate. Especially when the model is a monster.

Steve Mansfield-Devine
Full Frame

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A large green Loch Ness Monster floats gently on the surface of a lake. In the background are mountains and a raft with several people and camera tripods standing on it. A rope leads from the corner of the frame to the front of the monster.
Nessie in one of her more contemplative moods. © Steve Mansfield-Devine 1981.

There are monsters. I’ve seen them. Well, one.

Cryptozoology has always seemed like a very fringe belief to me, and I used to scoff at stories of yetis, Big Foot and the daddy (or mummy) of them all — the Loch Ness Monster. But I’ve not only seen that most famed of all beasts but spent several days with it, close enough to pat its nose.

At this point you’re probably thinking, ‘Does he mean the real Loch Ness Monster?’. To which the answer is obviously, duh.

But it was real enough. These days, you can generate almost anything with AI or CGI. If you want a ‘photograph’ of a monster you just ask a computer to do it. At the dawn of the 1980s, things weren’t so simple. But we’ll meet Nessie in a minute.

A rare glimpse of the beast in the cold, dark days of March. © Steve Mansfield-Devine 1981.
A rare glimpse of the beast in the cold, dark days of March. © Steve Mansfield-Devine 1981.

Anything can happen

In 1981, the Smirnoff vodka brand was running an ad campaign portraying various impossible or unlikely scenarios around the theme of ‘Well, they said anything…

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