The Historic National Museum London creates a yearly contest. It’s called ‘Wildlife photographer of the year’.
45.000 pictures were submitted. The photographers came from 96 countries. Only 100 pictures make it to this exhibition every year. The chosen pictures tour from country to country. At the time the exhibition is in Munich, Germany. I love animals, I had to see all these pictures of wild animals from around the globe.
The pictures were stunning.
Being a wildlife photographer means to have patience. Sometimes it takes days or months, perhaps even years to encounter an animal, that one wishes to photograph. Sometimes luck helps and the unexpected happens. A photographer could capture a bear in a village in Italy at night. This means to be present and to have a camera handy. Always.
I saw insects in that exhibitions, animals that live under water. I saw huge animals like bears, tigers and whales, others like the insects were tiny. Blow-ups could make tiny details visible.
A tiny part of the exhibition also showed the cruelty that human beings commit agains the animals.
What were the criteria of the jury to select a picture as one of the best?
They wanted to see a concept behind the pictures. One concept was to take pictures on eye level consequently
It was forbidden to take pictures in the exhibition. So I had to take my own wildlife pictures.
Usually the algorithm of a company is not known. This morning when I checked my flickr account, I realized that one of my swan pictures made it to ‘in explore’. This usually means that this picture gets a lot of likes and attention. Some photographers start to follow my account when this happens. I would have chosen the above picture for explore. The algorithm or perhaps real people (?) made another decision. The below pictures were chosen to be exhibited in that group.
