Wildlife Photographer of the Year - 2014

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is co-owned by two UK institutions that pride themselves on revealing and championing the diversity of life on Earth - the Natural History Museum and BBC Worldwide.

Each entry is evaluated individually by an international jury of photography experts, before being awarded a place in the top 100 images of the year. Out of these is picked the Wildlife Photographer of the year.
A major exhibition of the top images tours worldwide throughout the year. Auckland’s War Memorial Museum showcase the 2013 exhibition in April this year.

The images are published in BBC Wildlife Magazine and publications worldwide. As a result, the photographs are now seen by millions.
This year, the Museum is proud to announce the Associate Sponsorship of DONG Energy. Which is one of the leading energy groups in Northern Europe, and a world leader in offshore wind. Visit: www.dongenergy.com

For further details about the competition and its various categories and to view this year’s winners visit:
www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto

Category: Underwater SpeciesPosition: Finalist
Image Name: Touch of magic
Photographer Name: Adriano Morettin
Country: Italy
Technical Details: Nikon D800E + Sigma 15mm f2.8 lens; 1/160 sec at f18; ISO 100; Seacam housing + Superdome; two Seaflash 150 strobes.

Adriano had this picture in mind for 15 years before he had a chance to capture it. The nineteenth-century Miramare Castle, near his home in Trieste, stands on a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea. Last summer, a significant jellyfish swarm gathered beneath the cliffs – hundreds of barrel jellyfish and tens of fried-egg jellyfish in unusually clear water. Adriano needed to get close with his wide-angle lens, receiving many minor stings to his face in the process. But his real challenge was to follow the jellyfish as they moved – ‘using their domes like engines’ – waiting for two to touch near the surface and getting just the right angle to photograph them with the castle behind. Most difficult of all was balancing the exposure of the jellyfish with that of the sunlit castle above to reveal the beauty of both.

Category: Underwater SpeciesPosition: Finalist
Image Name: Silver streak
Photographer Name: Chris Gug
Country: USA
Technical Details: Nikon D90 + 10–17mm f3.5–4.5 lens at 17mm; 1/50 sec at f14; ISO 100; Aquatica housing; two Ikelite DS-161 strobes.

Shooting specifically to create fine-art prints, Chris was drawn to this massive gorgonian coral by the combination of strong colours and the 3-D feel created by his ultra-wide-angle lens. At more than 4 metres (13 feet) across, it was the largest gorgonian he had ever seen, and by day it sheltered a shoal of tiny cardinalfish, hiding them from the circling mackerel, jacks and other predators. Chris dived in this location every week for much of his two-year expedition to Papua New Guinea. ‘I was very familiar with this coral’, he says, ‘and had pre-visualized many compositions, but on this occasion, the cardinalfish were resting in a tighter vertical shoal than I could have hoped for.’ The greatest challenge was getting close to the coral without touching and therefore harming it and positioning his strobes (above and below) without spooking the fish. He achieved the composition he was after and even managed to reveal that some of the cardinalfish had extended throat pouches, indicating that they were males incubating clutches of eggs in their mouths.

Category: MammalsPosition: Finalist
Image Name: Creative dining
Photographer Name: Brian Skerry USA
Technical Details:Nikon D4 + 500mm lens; 1/1600 sec at f9; ISO 3200.

The extraordinary mud-ring-hunting technique of bottlenose dolphins is known to occur in only two locations: Crystal River and Florida Bay, in Florida. Brian headed for the bay, hoping to photograph this rare behaviour as part of a project on intelligence. The shallows over the mudflats are rich feeding grounds for the dolphins. When a shoal is detected, one dolphin zooms over and circles it, striking the mud with its tail to create a wall of muddy water around the prey. As the wall starts to collapse, the panicking fish leap out of the water towards the rest of the dolphin gang, who line up just outside the ring and athletically snatch the fish from the air. To frame the dolphins in the act – the hunt taking just seconds – was a challenging prospect. Brian captured the moment when the lead dolphin completed a perfectly coiled ring and its two accomplices jumped up, mouths agape.

Category: Natural DesignPosition: Winner
Image Name: Cardinal Sparks
Photographer Name: Patrik Bartuska
Country: Czech Republic
Technical Details: Canon EOS 5D Mark II + 16–35mm f2.8 lens; 1/8 sec at f9; ISO 320; Seacam housing; Seaflash strobes

It was the contrasts in movement and texture that entranced Patrik – the soft tentacles swaying in the current and the flicks of the angular, patterned fish sheltering within the anemone. He had encountered the show while diving in the Lembeh Strait in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. It had been his goal to photograph a group of the beautiful Banggai cardinalfish – found only in the waters off Sulawesi and endangered because of overfishing for the aquarium trade. Mostly he encountered small groups of adults around the coral. But what he was after was a group associating with an anemone – juveniles, which in the day make use of the protection of the tentacles, either avoiding their stings or in some way unaffected by them. It took many dives before he found this large grouping. Together, they appeared to Patrik like an underwater fire display, the tentacles like licking flames and the fish like erratic sparks. To capture the moving pattern he chose to shoot from above, holding his position in the current and waiting for the moment when the fish sparks flew and he could frame the composition.  

Category: InvertebratesPosition: Finalist
Image Name: You have been warned
Photographer Name: Alex Mustard
Country: United Kingdom
Technical Details: Nikon D4 + 105mm f2.8 lens + Nauticam Super Macro Converter; 1/250 sec at f40; ISO 200; Subal ND4 housing; two Inon Z-240 strobes.

When Alex went diving in the Lembeh Strait in North Sulawesi, he was on a mission to celebrate the smaller sea creatures. Equipped with a new high-magnification lens, he encountered this variable neon nudibranch (sea slug) crawling across the seabed. Less than 2 centimetres (an inch) long, with green gills on its back and orange mouthparts, it has orange, feather-like rhinophores that it uses to ‘smell’ out its prey – sea squirts. It incorporates distasteful chemicals from the sea squirts’ skin into a slimy mucus and uses neon colours to warn predators that it tastes bad. Alex wanted an eye-level view of this unforgettable mollusc. But even with a small aperture, it was a challenge: there was little depth of field (amount in focus) and the subject was moving – and a slug’s pace under magnification is surprisingly fast.

Category: Underwater SpeciesPosition: Finalist
Image Name: Little Squid
Photographer Name:Fabien Michenet
Country: France
Technical Details: Nikon D800 + 105mm f2.8 lens; 1/320 sec at f16; ISO 200; Nauticam housing;
two Inon Z-240 strobes.

Planktonic animals are usually photographed under controlled situations, after they’ve been caught, but Fabien is fascinated by the beauty of their living forms and aims to photograph their natural behaviour in the wild. Night-diving in deep water off the coast of Tahiti, in complete silence apart from the occasional sound of dolphins, and surrounded by a mass of tiny planktonic animals, he became fascinated by this juvenile sharpear enope squid. Just 3 centimetres (an inch) long, it was floating motionless about 20 metres (66 feet) below the surface, probably hunting even smaller creatures that had migrated up to feed under cover of darkness. Its transparent body was covered with polka dots of pigment-filled cells, and below its eyes were bioluminescent organs. Knowing it would be sensitive to light and movement, Fabien gradually manoeuvred in front of it, trying to hang as motionless as his subject. Using as little light as possible to get the autofocus working, he finally triggered the strobes and took the squid’s portrait before it disappeared into the deep.