Wet your hands. Don't use a tailing glove. Better yet, don't take the fish out of the water! I try my best, honestly I occasionally don't wet my hands if I feel taking the time to do so puts the fish at risk... but those are rare circumstances. It is not worth photographing a fish if it dies as a result.
If you look at my blog posts, there are a lot of pictures of fish being held in the water, or even post-release. Frankly those make for far better photos. I reserve the "grip-n-grins" for carp and big specimens of other species. In pretty much every of the photos where I am holding a trout, you will see that my hands are wet. If you aren't going to hold the fish for a picture, wet leaves and moss are decent, but don't let fish flop around in sand or dry leaf litter if it can be avoided.
And don't take a picture of every fish you catch! If I did that there would be a significantly greater amount of photos in each post. For example, on my first day ever fishing the Farmington River, I caught roughly 10 fish. I took pictures of two. The very next day my catch exceeded 15 but I only have pictures of a wild brooky, one brown and one rainbow from that day. Nobody needs to see the photos of all those other fish, do they?
Very good information, glad you posted this. Hope you are feeling better.
ReplyDeleteTie, fish, write and photo on...
It is something every fisherman needs to learn about.
DeleteThanks for sharing this! Hopefully some of your readers learned something from it.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you sent it!
Delete