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Ocean photographer Craig Parry is used to capturing nature at its best. One of his most famous images is an underwater selfie with a whale snapped in the water off Tonga. However, it's a striking drone photo of a stranded humpback on a beach in northern New South Wales that won him a prestigious Ocean Photographer of the Year award. "I'm always taking beautiful shots of animals that are you know, loving their environment, and when I did submit this photo, it was kind of difficult for me," Mr Parry said. "I just wanted to show what my community were doing. So, it was mixed emotions." It was the early hours of July 1 this year when Mr Parry, who lives in Byron Bay, received a call about the whale beached at Lennox Head. Soon, people from Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia (ORRCA), and SeaWorld Marine Rescue were all on the scene. For 15 hours, members of the community rallied together on Seven Mile Beach to try and save the stranded humpback. "It's one of those things that really brought the community together, especially up on the Northern Rivers," Mr Parry said. "We're really environmentally conscious and we respect the wildlife around us. "And that was the special part where you could just see everyone working together as a team, and you could see with everyone the passion they had, and they wanted this animal to survive," Mr Parry added. Sadly, it did not. "When you think about animals or whales, especially, that have been beached, they're not there because they're healthy.," Mr Parry said. "When whales get on the beaches, they weigh 40 tons. "And so, you can imagine being sort of suspended in water then having all that weight pressed on their chest." For the first time in the competition's history two Australian photographers won first place in their categories. Two Australians amongst finalists Mr Parry's Stranded won the Human Connection category, while Melbourne photographer Marcia Riederer placed first in the Fine Art category. Her image of a dwarf minke whale was photographed on the Ribbon Reefs, part of the Great Barrier Reef. These two pictures will be among 112 finalists and winners of the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 on display at the Australian Maritime Museum from Wednesday. The overall winner was a striking image Indonesia-based macro expert Yury Ivanov of two tiny critters known as the "ladybugs of the sea". The miniature marine creatures, amphipods from the Cyproideidae family, measure just three millimetres in length. Mr Parry's entry was not the only one to show sea creatures in distress. Second place in the Conservation (impact) category features dead sharks in an anchovy fishing net. Taken in Indonesia, photographer Daniel Flormann said the entangled creatures and the "whale shark's injured caudal fin both tell stories of human impact". Mr Parry regularly sees migrating species caught in drum lines and nets that are "really not getting the target species they're after". "It is a topic that's quite confronting for me that, you know, we have all these animals getting caught in these nets, and it's just unnecessary to see," he said.
