We have another tragic story to bring about someone who lost his life while taking a selfie.
We bring you these stories to help encourage situational awareness and promote safe practices when taking pictures of any type.
Even the professionals get hurt in the line of duty, and often it is through no fault of their own as a recent story we covered demonstrates.
This report is quite similar. According to FStoppers, 21-year-old Richard Jacobson fell to his death off of a cliff in the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix while attempting a selfie. After Jacobson fell, his friend placed a call to 911 around 12:45 and the victim’s body was found the next day.
FStoppers further reports that, between 2011 and 2017, a total of 259 people died while taking selfies. The article doesn’t mention the number of accidents that don’t result in death during that same period but we’d imagine that it is a much, much larger number.
In fact, many of the stories we cover tend to just result in injury and rarely death. Still, it is worth noting how dangerous this kind of thing can be. Particularly, many of our stories of this type feature national parks and wildlife preserves. This has brought up a continual debate about the level of access the public should be given to these sites and whether or not they should be roped off entirely. For photographers, barriers and the like are never a good thing but we’re just a small subset of the overall groups that visit these kinds of places. And, as we said, photography can be dangerous, selfie or not.
Be safe out there.
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