Description
LOCATION: Bahamas
STORY BEHIND THE SHOT: What a rush it is to feel an apex predator heading straight for you! As intimidating as it seems, any shark-lover can tell you, there’s really no risk here – the great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran) is just coming in for the scent of my bait, which is the only way to get photo like this. Yes, I’ve had random lucky chance encounters with hammerheads without using bait many times, but never has that resulted in a photo opportunity. What amazes me most about the great hammerhead, is it’s ability to turn a full circle in it’s own body length! One would expect the agility of a cow from such a large fish, but this beauty can spin with blinding speed, putting it’s bitey bits where it’s tail was just a 1/2 second before. Still, when the food is easy, and being handed to them, they are surprisingly relaxed and calm. The clear water and white-sandy bottom in the Bahamas makes for the best place for up-close hammerhead encounters. In the early 2000’s we began to understand their migrating patterns, and year after year, a consortium of scientists, photographers, and dive boat captains have been tracking the migration. The Bahamas government has done a better job than perhaps any other country at understanding that a living shark is worth magnitudes more in tourism dollars than a shark killed by fisherman, and that is why I keep returning again and again, getting to know individual sharks by name.
Oh, and did I mention the cling-ons? Riding the shark, you can see two bar jacks and a yellowtail snapper up top, and four sharksucker remoras attached to her belly. This shadowing beavior (or clinging, in the case of the sharksuckers) serves two purposes – they save energy by swimming near the hammerhead sucking on, or riding it’s pressure wave, and then they grab scraps from when the hammerhead makes a catch – particularly when the catch is an easy fish carcas that was scraps from a Bahamian restaurant the night before!
And I hope you picked up on the nod to Carl Carlton’s, “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” from the early 1980’s. It’s the song I sing through my scuba regulator every time I photograph a hammerhead shark! But when I first released the print, clients kept seeing the title and pronouncing it “Mahmma Jah-mah”, and I was like, “no man, weren’t you around in 1981?”, so I changed the spelling to “Mammer Jammer” to help the young bloods who weren’t around in the era of the greatest music!
While there are plenty of shark photographs to choose from in the the Fish Faces and SeaScapes Collections, if you’re simply in love with hammerhead sharks, be sure to also check out Belly of the Beast, another great hammerhead shark from the Bahamas, and the simply named, Hammerheads, which features the silhouette of a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks from Cocos Island on the Pacific side of Costa Rica.
TO PURCHASE A PRINT: It’s best to keep it at or near the photograph’s original 3:2 ratio, so think in terms of 16×24″, 20×30″, 60×40″, etc. But if you need a custom crop or measurement, let us know, and we’ll be happy to try. Bad Mama Hama…. excuse me…. Bad Mammer Hammer is available as a fine art print on aluminum starting at 16×24″ up to 120″ wide. Purchase standard 3:2 ratios online here, or call/email for a customization that fits your space perfectly.