Wild Wonders Runner-up

More good news from the contest front. This, I assume familiar, image of a Red Squirrel made it to the runner-up position of the January edition of the online Wild Wonders contest.

Every month, the jury choose the finalists for the contest in four categories. It is then up to the visitors of the website to vote for their favourite image. I got two images in the finals, this one, and a backlit short-eared owl. As said, the squirrel made it to the runner-up position. Many thanks therefore to all of you who voted for it!

You may want to take a look at this months finalists here. There are again amazing images to be voted for, including ones by Dutchies Andrew George, Leon Baas, Heike Odermatt and Edwin Kats.

The prestigious Wild Wonders project, initiated by Peter Cairns, Florian Möllers and Staffan Widstrand, has a very noble aim. A quote from their website, which is definately worth a visit because of the amazing photographs that are showcased by the 58 participating photographers:


Wild Wonders of Europe is about sharing the amazing natural wonders of our continent with 700 million Europeans and the World! Our aim is so that we can all better reconnect to this wonderful heritage, enjoy it more and take care of it more wisely for the future.

Asferico 2009 Runner-up

The good news has been in my mailbox for about a month now, but only now are the results open to the public: I am very happy and proud to announce that my image of "stripes & stripes" has won a runner-up position in the "Composition and forms" category of the Italian photo competition Asferico.

The photo was created in South Africas Kruger national park in October 2007. On a cloudy and rainy day when not many animals were eager to have their picture taken, I decided to focus on abstract images of common species. I am glad I did...


All results of the competition can be found on their website. As you can see, we seem to have a lot of photographic talent in the Netherlands, as there are many Dutch photographers among the winners. Jasper Doest, Theo Bosboom and Edwin Giesbers have been established names in the international photo competition game for some time now. It is good to see that new talent is on the doorstep, with amongst others Wendy Kreeftenberg, Wilco Dragt and Paul van Hoof. Underwater photographer Peter Verhoog has even won multiple awards.

The award ceremony will be in Italy on April 4, 2009. I guess the organisation might just as well use Dutch as the language of choice.

Patterns of Burchell's Zebra; Canon 1D Mark III w. 500/4 IS; 1/125s at F5,6 and ISO 400; Beanbag from car window.

Unleash the ratio

I don't know about you, but I tend to be overconservative when it comes to cropping my images. Somewhere in my mind is this absurd little voice that forces me not to deviate from the 'out-of-camera' ratio of 3:2. So even when a different ratio would lead to a result that is more pleasing to the eye, I refrain from doing so. I have no idea where this irritating habit of mine finds its origin. Maybe I'm just too tidy a person. Nah, can't be.

Anyway, only recently have I allowed other ratios to slip into my image archive. But I make sure the number of different ratios remains small and manageable. By know, I am the proud owner of several panoramic images with 2:1 and 3:1 ratios. I even have a few panoramic images composed of multiple shots that have a 4:1 ratio. You could call me a daredevil.

It may just be a matter of time before the first square image or, for cryin'out loud, a 4:3 image might slip through the cracks and live its life to the fullest on my external harddisk. I'll let you know as soon as I have taken this dangerously enormous risk, if I live to tell, that is.

But seriously: sometimes it pays to look beyond the regular, everyday 3:2 ratio. Too often the sky or foreground in a landscape photograph is not interesting enuogh to take up all this space in your carefully composed image. In such cases, just be hard-boiled on those redundant pixels and crop the crap.

Frozen heathland panorama; Canon 1D Mark III w. 70-200/4; 1/500s at F8 and ISO 100; Gitzo tripod

Exhibitionism

When I won the Grasduinen photography competition last year, the editors told me they wanted to publish a portfolio of some of my images in their magazine. Well, today's the day! You can find the portfolio in this months edition.

I am rather happy with the images they chose from the batch I had sent them. They look good next to eachother colorwise, fit February well weatherwise and nicely represent all of my favourite photographic themes and locations. Birds, mammals, landscapes, Netherlands, Europe and Africa. Could not be better!

What really surprised me was the note I got last week that one of my images made it to the cover of this same edition. The closeup of a squirrel was chosen to illustrate the main topic of this edition: which mammals do we like, which ones don't we like, and why?

It seems squirrels play an important role in the development of my photographic career. The same squirrel image that won the 2008 Grasduinen competition reached the finals of the WildWonders competition and now another image of the same individual made it to the cover. I guess I'll have to rapidly find myself another squirrel to keep the flow going.

It is and always will remain a strange sensation to walk into a bookstore and see your own photo on the shelf. Even better: see other people buy the magazine with your cover image. That is the strange thing about us nature photographers: we prefer to go out alone and can be really individualistic, even self-contained persons. But inside all of us lives a senior exhibitionist: we love to share our images with other people and go a long way to have our photos published in magazines and the like. I use to refer to it as schizo-photographic. All rights reserved...