Sometimes, it pays to put down your phone and take a quick glance at the world around you. Especially if there’s a massive humpback whale just a few feet away from you.
Photographer Eric Smith was snapping some photographs of two humpbacks whales – a mother and her calf – swimming a mile off the coast of Redondo Beach, California.
It was only later on, as he was looking through his shots, that he noticed something strange. Or rather, something strangely amusing.
Some of his shots captured a man sitting on a boat near Smith’s, casually looking down at his phone while a humpback whale surfaced just a few feet away.
“It was just magnificent,” Smith told CBS News in Los Angeles. “Through the course of five or six shots, he never moved. And the whale was so close to the boat, I was like, you must put the phone down. I can’t believe you didn’t look at the whale.”
Smith posted the photo to his Instagram account where it quickly became a viral sensation, with many commenting that the photo makes an ironic statement on modern society.
(Hopefully, they weren’t commenting about said ironic statement while missing something that was happening right beside them.)
Smith, meanwhile, acknowledges the possibility to CBS News that the man was absorbed by something important – a critical business matter, an urgent text, photos of his first child or something similar – and may have had a very good reason to be buried in his phone.
“This is not about one guy on a boat,” Smith said. “The photograph is not about that. It’s a commentary on society today.”
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