Often photographers who have posted their work online will find that one of their pictures has been grabbed by someone else, combined with elements from a different photo (or otherwise digitally altered) to make it more compelling or salacious, and sent winging around the Internet to spread virally from inbox to inbox. In many cases these manipulated photographs depict people in imminent danger from large, dangerous, scary animals, such as widely-circulated images of a hapless parachutist about to descend into a lake surrounded by alligators, or scuba divers (both military and civilian) who are shown as being mere seconds away from becoming a shark's next meal.
A popular online image is of similar ilk, seemingly showing a kayaker in Sitka, Alaska, scooting across the gaping, soon-to-be-gulping jaw of a humpback whale:
This story/photo is from Dr. Kraft who is a physician in Sitka.
Wow, what are the chances of taking this picture just at this moment:
Yep, that is me in the picture. Yep that is a whale that was just around the corner from the ferry terminal.
"Paddle really fast" is the only thing I could think of at the time.
Also thinking that I don't look like a herring, don't smell like a herring but with the same herring instinct of "get the hell out of the way of that big mouth!!"
Still living to tell yet another story...
Like many such images, this is a manufactured phony, a jape created by merging two photographs taken at different times and places:
