Winners announced!

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2021 Winners announced!

The 2021 Buglife Bug Photography Awards winners have been announced!

The overall quality of the entries has been EVEN better in this second year, and the judges have had an immensely difficult task to select the winners.

We’re delighted to announce that the Buglife Bug Photographer of the Year 2021 is Steve James from Northampton, UK. Steve has a technical mastery of the genre, and is a deserving winner. He wins a host of prizes including £2,500 cash.

Our Buglife Young Bug Photographer of the Year is 14-year old Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas from Berlin, Germany. Like Steve, his technical skills are outstanding, and he combines them with a beautifully clean aesthetic.

For this second edition of the awards we’ve been delighted to welcome Buglife on-board as our title partner, in support of their vital invertebrate conservation work.

And we’ve been proud to boast another stellar judging panel, and £21,000 of prizing to give away, including £5,000 in cash. We’d like to thank all of our sponsors for their support and the prizes they’ve put up this year.

The awards will be back for their 3rd year in 2022. To get all the news, you can sign up to our Bug Awards mailing list above.

The Buglife Bug Photographer of the Year 2021

Steve is the grand prize winner of this second year of the awards, in recognition of the diverse and technically excellent studies that he produces of the insect life that he finds around his Northampton, UK home. He’s had a long-lasting love of photography, inspired by his father’s interest. He’s fascinated by the worlds “as alien as science fiction” that one uncovers in the most common of places, and he hopes that by portraying insects at large scale, humans will have more sympathy for them. He recommends anyone with an interest to plant up an area of their garden with native flowers, and he was amazed during lockdown to see how quickly the grass verges that were left to grow became full of insect life. He likens the experience of building a focus-stacked image on a screen, to that you’d get watching a print come to life in darkroom developing fluids.

Steve James

The Buglife Young Bug Photographer of the Year 2021

Alexis is 14 years old, is half Greek and half Canadian, and lives in Berlin, Germany. He got his first camera in 2017 and has been taking photos ever since. He says “I like that I can do macro photography anywhere and I don't have to go far away or to a special location to find interesting subjects. I got more seriously into macro photography in the initial lockdown in 2020 and spent a lot of time near my house looking for bugs.” He wins with this excellent shot of a Masked bee. His top tip is to use a flash and diffuser, to achieve nice even lighting.

See more of Alexis' images on Instagram

Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas

Press for the Bug Photography Awards 2020…

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