Nature

This is a lovely frame – showing patience when the snow is coming down, even with a captive subject, takes perseverance, and the natural inclination here is just to bosh off a frame of the lynx facing away from you and call it a day. This nicely captured head-turn – as well as some nicely sorted colour treatment and just enough saturation – makes for a lovely snowy frame.

I’m not sure, from a technical perspective, what’s happening with this frame. But whether the noise, chromatic abberation and slightly soft edges are an artistic intention or the result of a big crop is really irrelevant – this is a really lovely looking image. I love the autumnal colours and there’s some great structure courtesy of the tree on the left hand side. Without knowing what the frame looked like in the viewfinder it’s difficult to say whether I really like the widescreen aspect ratio of the final image, but the central composition and colour treatment are both top-notch.

Why are small birds such jerks? You see ospreys being mobbed all the time; the equivalent of a big guy in a bar being constantly challenged to fights by drunk regulars. Anyway, this frame is really nicely timed and focussed. It’s obviously a really big crop, while underlines some of the sharpening in the frame. It’s very easy to Monday-morning quarterback this kind of frame, but please forgive me for suggesting that losing a stop of ISO (only reducing the shutter speed to a still-sharp 1/1000th) might have made for a technically better looking frame. Everything else is bang on, which is what counts.

My goodness. It takes a bit of bravery to enter a frame like this into a nature photography contest – you’re up against perfectly sharp images of far more exotic wildlife, so this takes a bit of confidence. What I love about this is that the subject will be instantly identifiable to anyone with a passing interest in birds, while remaining gloriously chaotic. A really beautiful image and a top candidate for printing really big.

Who doesn’t love a penguin? Not me, so this calmly-composed, nicely timed, well-edited image really stood out. The pose is perfect and I like the composition, with the little humpy hill in the background giving the image a bit more structure than a purely flat horizon. Well-timed, well-shot, well-delivered.

This is a really hard frame to get right. You need to get the strong backlight correctly exposed while at the same time keeping the subject visible. The temptation to give the shadow sliders a strong yank must have been nearly irresistible, but the photographer has let the light do the talking and the result is a really well put-together image. I particularly love how the flowers pick up the backlight in the same way as the rimlight on the fox.

I just love the colours here. Late in the evening or before sunrise is an amazing time to photograph strong volcanic activity – the colour of the lava contrasts really well against the sky in the background; the test is whether the photographer is brave enough to try a few long exposures to go alongside their sharp-as-a-tack lava explosions. I love this frame – the foreground might not be perfectly sharp but who cares – I really like how the steam and smoke are billowing through the frame.

I love flamingos but they’re actually really difficult birds to photograph. Aggressive, constantly on the move and often challenged by difficult, busy backgrounds, the amount of thought and patience that has gone into this shot has resulted in something properly spectacular. The strong light on the bird and the shadowy background have been used to thoughtful, impactful effect, and the processing – if there even is any – is subtle and sympathetic. An absolute dream of an image.

Bang. What a frame. As far as preparation and technical prowess goes this is perhaps the strongest frame in the competition – it takes quite a bit of know-how to get a subject lit like this, as well as – I imagine – quite a few goes to get such a strong composition.

I just absolutely love this. It’s just such a fantastically strong, muscular image of a really incredible animal. It’s a difficult job – even at f/7.1, depth of field is pretty shallow, so getting your focus right is critical, and that’s hard when you’re shooting from the side of a moving boat, with a subject that could appear at any distance, at any time. Black and white treatments of nature photography can be hit and miss, but this is definitely the former.

Please forgive me for being a patronising old geezer, but this is a good opportunity to pass on a bit of knowledge. White tigers – generally – don’t occur in nature, so the only places you’ll see one is in captivity, where they’ve been inbred to within an inch of their lives to ensure that distinctive, lucrative white colour. With that inbreeding comes a host of other problems such as gigantism, neurological problems, immune system issues and plenty else. Anywhere that has white tigers to photograph should be looked at really carefully before you spend your money with them.