'Get out of the water!' Life-saving detail revealed in photos taken seconds apart
During a recent trip to the beach, photographer Dan Watson decided to get the drone out to capture some aerial shots as his kids played in the ocean below.
It was very nearly a life-saving move.
After launching the drone on a recent Sunday at Florida's New Smyrna Beach, he began watching the live feed as the camera streamed back to his phone.
That’s when he noticed it.
"Within 30 seconds of getting the drone up into the air ... I started seeing the shadow moving through the water," he told Buzzfeed News US.
Just nearby the menacing shadow, his three children aged five, six and nine, were swimming unaware.
He immediately screamed “shark!”
"I'm screaming at my wife, who is a little bit closer to the kids, and we're running out to get them and yelling at them to get in," Mr Watson recalled.
"During that moment, I was worried that they wouldn’t get out in time ... from what I was seeing, and it was moving fairly quickly."
Despite the sudden terror of the moment. The professional photographer didn’t forget to capture the scene. He snapped a couple photos which he later shared on Instagram.
In the first photo, the group of children can be seen playing in the shallow water near the shore. About 15 metres away, the shark lurks, and appears to be headed in their direction.
“See that dark shadow making its way straight for the shore & those people? That was my view this weekend,” Mr Watson wrote on an Instagram post on June 25.
“The next image that resulted from my yelling to get out of the water and the unmistakable outline of a shark. Definitely too close of an encounter for my liking!”
It is unclear what kind of shark it was but the incident was enough for Mr Watson and his family to stay out of the water for a while, he said.
Just days later a four-metre shark terrified beachgoers after it was spotted swimming in shallow water at the same Florida beach where Jaws 2 was filmed.
And on the NSW Mid North Coast beach of Tuncurry a great white was filmed cruising dangerously close to a group of surfers last month.
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