insights into photography
It is that time of year when the various award and competitions in photography announce their winners. This is always a very popular award with many different sections. The images are universally remarkable and express the dedication and technical skill of the winners.
This image won the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2016 award, and depicts an endangered young male orangutan climbing a 100-foot high tree in the Gunung Palung National Park, Indonesia
Indian photographer Ganesh H Shankar won the Birds category for capturing a rose-ringed parakeet kicking a Bengal monitor lizard out of its roosting hole, a campaign that lasted two days before the lizard squatter gave up
Images from both professional and amateur photographers are selected for their creativity, artistry and technical complexity.
Swedish photographer Mats Andersson triumphed in the black-and-white category with his touching photo of an owl mourning the death of its partner, taken in a forest near his home in Bashult, southern Sweden.
Other winners included Luis Javier Sandoval, from Mexico, with his photo of a playful California sea lion pup for the Impressions category. And Ganesh H Shankar, from India, with his image of a rose-ringed parakeet harassing a monitor lizard.
Luis Javier Sandoval, from Mexico, won the Impressions category for his tricky underwater photo of a playful California sea lion pup grabbing a starfish near shore break at sunrise in Espiritu Santo Island near La Paz Baja California Sur, Mexico
Winner of the urban category was Nayan Khanolkar, who captured a solitary leopard slinking down an alleyway in a suburb of Mumbai bordering Sanjay Gandhi national park, where the Warli tribe has learned to co-exist with the nocturnal big cats
The exhibition opens at the Natural History Museum on October 21, before touring across the UK
Gideon Knight, 16, from the UK, won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title for his poetic image of a moonlit crow on a sycamore tree , a sight he described as reminding him of ‘something out of a fairy tale’
You can book tickets for the exhibition
This time of year sees many of the major competitions coming to a close and awards being made. Now it is the turn of Wildlife Photographer of the Year Here is a quick look at this years winners, we will return with a more expansive post later
“A Tale of Two Foxes”: Don Gutoski’s picture captures a symmetry in life and death,
To the victor the spoils. An image of warring foxes has won the 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
Taken by amateur Don Gutoski, the picture captures the moment a red fox hauls away the carcass of its Arctic cousin following a deadly attack in Canada’s Wapusk National Park. “It’s the best picture I’ve ever taken in my life,” Don told BBC News. “It’s the symmetry of the heads, the bodies and the tails – even the expression on the faces.”
These scarlet ibis were photographed by Jonathan Jagot (France), off the island of Lençóis on the coast of northeast Brazil. Jonathan is the category winner in the “15-17 years” of age group
14-year-old Ondrej Pelánek from the Czech Republic for his image, Fighting Ruffs.
The “Under Water” winner is Michael Aw (Australia). This is a Bryde’s whale ripping through a sardine “bait ball” offshore of South Africa’s Transkei coast
Edwin Giesbers (Netherlands) pictures a newt from underneath as it moves across the surface of a stream. The picture wins the “Amphibians and Reptiles” category
Juan Tapia (Spain) wins the “Impressions” category. It is a staged scene in which a broken canvas has been placed over a broken windowpane that barn swallows have been using to enter an old storehouse in Almeria, southern Spain
The BBC has a long article on the prize
The Natural History Museum as sponsor has much more
There is an exhibition at NHM, details are here
The Natural History Museum
16 October 2015 – 10 April 2016
10.00-17.50 (last admission 17.15)
From our source deep in the bowels of the NHM in Oxford we get details of a photography competition with not bad prizes. Of course to get your hands on a prize you do have to enter. Here is a link to the page on their website http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/about/artfund.htm
Basically you snap and either email or post the image(s) to Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #motyphoto (and ideally the Museum handle too which is @morethanadodo). There doesn’t seem to be a subject area but NHM has so much to photograph.
To celebrate our nomination, take part in the Museum of the Year Photography Competition by tagging your favourite photos of the Museum with #motyphoto on Instagram or Twitter. You can also upload your photos toartfund.org/prize/photo-competition.
Renowned British documentary photographer and photo-journalist, Martin Parr will be the lead judge in selecting a shortlist from all submitted photographs and the public can vote online for their favourite between 8-22 June 2015, with the winner announced 25 June.
The winning photograph will be published in the Art Fund’s Art Quarterly magazine and the winner will receive a photography holiday in Berlin for two plus a £500 photography equipment voucher.
That time of year again, here are the results of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2014
Nick is a photographic artist and journalist who uses his skills to tell stories about environmental issues and our relationship with wildlife. His career, much of it with National Geographic, spans more than 35 years, and his work has been published in numerous books and magazines. The mass of accolades he has received reflects the international recognition reputation he has earned.
Nick set out to create an archetypal image that captured the essence of lions in a time long gone, before they were under such threat. The Vumbi pride in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park are a ‘formidable and spectacularly co-operative team,’ Nick says. Here the five females lie at rest with their cubs on a kopje (a rocky outcrop). Shortly before he took the shot, they had attacked and driven off one of the pride’s two males. Now they were lying close together, calmly sleeping. They were used to Nick’s presence as he’d been following them for nearly six months, so he could position his vehicle close to the kopje. He framed the vista with the plains beyond and the dramatic late afternoon sky above. He photographed the lions in infrared, which he says ‘cuts through the dust and haze, transforms the light and turns the moment into something primal, biblical almost’. The chosen picture of lions in Africa is part flashback, part fantasy. Nick got to know and love the Vumbi pride. A few months later, he heard they had ventured outside the park and three females had been killed.
Canon EOS 5D Mark III + 24–70mm f2.8 lens at 32mm; 1/250 sec at f8; ISO 200.
Carlos has been taking photographs seriously for the past three years (since he was five) and has already won prizes in Spanish, Italian and French competitions. He loves nature, whatever and wherever it is, and spends as much time as possible out photographing the plants and animals around that live near his home in Spain.
This common yellow scorpion is flourishing its sting as a warning. Carlos had found it basking on a flat stone in a rocky area near his home in Torralba de los Sisones, northeast Spain – a place he often visits to look for reptiles. The late afternoon Sun was casting such a lovely glow over the scene that Carlos decided to experiment with a double exposure for the first time so he could include it. He started with the background, using a fast speed so as not to overexpose the Sun, and then shot the scorpion using a low flash. But he had to change lenses, using his zoom for the Sun, which is when the scorpion noticed the movement and raised its tail. Carlos then had to wait for it to settle before taking his close-up, with the last of the light illuminating its body.
Nikon D300 + 105mm f2.8 lens (28–300mm lens for the background); 1/320 sec at f10; ISO 320; flash.
Alexander was taking his daily hike along a trail in the Blackfoot Valley, western Montana, USA, when he noticed a giant puffball mushroom starting to inflate. Squirrels, chipmunks and mice began exploring and scent-marking the surface of the oversized fungus leaving it covered with tiny prints. Alex returned to the spot during a full Moon, when the puffball had reached its maximum size. He lay on the ground, watching and waiting, entertained by the dozens of small animals exploring the puffball. The most frequent visitors were deer mice, which scampered around, sometimes pausing to check on their surroundings. To avoid disturbing the animals, and to preserve the sense of place, Alex used the Moon as his backlighting. He relied on a long exposure and a gentle pulse of flash to show the curve of the fungus and to capture the frantic activity. When one deer mouse paused for a moment to investigate a persistent mosquito, the perfect midnight puffball scene was created.
Canon EOS-1D Mark IV + 105mm lens; 2.5 sec at f14; ISO 250; Canon 430EX II flash.
Bence had set up his hide to overlook Lake Csaj in Kiskunság National Park, Hungary. He had a specific image in mind and had planned to use both artificial and natural light. His subject was the shy grey heron. To overcome the various technological challenges of a night-time shot, he had built two timing devices for his camera to execute the single exposure. One device moved the focus, while the other adjusted the aperture within a single frame, so both the herons and the stars were in focus. It took 74 nights in the hide before the conditions were right and it all came together. The surface of the lake was still, reflecting the stars, and the sky was clear and motionless. Just after midnight, the seven stars of the Plough (part of the Ursa Major constellation) slid into position above the glow of a distant town. Bence took the shot, with both the stars and herons sharp, but with traces of the birds’ movement leaving ghostly impressions against the sky. Blending technology and passion in a masterful manner, Bence had finally created a picture that he had planned for many years – of herons imprinting their images in time and space.
Nikon D800 + Sigma 15mm f2.8 lens; 32 sec (1 sec at f10, then 31 sec at f2.8) + two custom-made gadgets; ISO 2000; four flashes; tripod; hide.
Oxford School of Photography 