{"id":70764,"date":"2020-12-18T07:02:07","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T11:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/?p=70764"},"modified":"2025-03-07T11:43:18","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T15:43:18","slug":"humbled-and-the-inspiration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/2020\/12\/18\/humbled-and-the-inspiration\/","title":{"rendered":"Humbled. And inspired …"},"content":{"rendered":"

What’s Up?<\/h3>\n

Me, early, as usual. It is Friday 18 December 2020. I will be heading to Fort DeSoto at about 6:15am. The forecast looks great: cloudy followed early by sunny skies with northeast winds from 10-13mph. And a rather chilly 43 degrees … It would probably be a good day not to get my feet wet, but I will \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n

Remember, as always, that one of the best ways to improve as a nature photographer is to look at as many great images as possible. <\/p>\n

Humbled<\/h3>\n

I am not sure how I got on the mailing list for NPOTY. Ahyhoo, when I got to my AirBNB in Gulfport, I clicked on the link<\/a> and came to this:<\/p>\n

Nature Photographer of the Year is a Nature Photography contest that celebrates the beauty of nature photography. We have some fantastic prizes for you to win including our top prize of \u20ac 3.000,- cash for the winner, plus other great cash prizes and cool photo equipment. When you enter our nature photo competition you will also support various nature conservations projects.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thumbnails of the 2020 winners were laid out below the overall winner. Many of them looked intriguing so I began clicking on them one at a time. For the most part, I was blown away. I read the photographer’s comments and about the photographers for the better part of an hour. I was drained. I was impressed. For a while, I did not even feel like going out to photograph. <\/p>\n

There is a fine line between being inspired and feeling as if the best move would be to throw all of your camera gear into the bay. Eventually, I headed down to DeSoto, inspired. <\/p>\n

Click on this link<\/a> to view the winning images. I will list my very favorites below. Feel free to leave a comment detailing your favorites. <\/p>\n

My Favorites from the 2020 NPOTY Contest<\/h3>\n

These are listed in the order of appearance. If I absolutely loved the image the moment I saw it, it made my list. Many of the images that did not make my list are none-the-less amazing and inspirational. <\/p>\n

Name of photographer | Image title\/AWARD & CATEGORY <\/p>\n

Andreas Geh | Brambling Togetherness\/WINNER CATEGORY BIRDS
\nRick Beldegreen | Lone egret among fall colors of the cypress swamp\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY BIRDS
\nOscar Diez | Storm \/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY BIRDS
\nNeelutpaul Barua | Heavenly Showers\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY MAMMALS
\nThomas Vijayan |The World Is Going Upside Down\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY MAMMALS
\nSergio Rivero Beneitez | Cocos Island\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY OTHER ANIMALS
\nSwapnil Deshpande | The earthern mattress\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY PLANTS AND FUNGI
\nOliver Smart | A World Away\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY LANDSCAPES
\nJie Fischer | Flyover\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY LANDSCAPES
\nMilo\u0161 Prelevi\u0107 | In The Hiding\/WINNER CATEGORY UNDERWATER
\nKarim Iliya | Striped Hunter\/RUNNER-UP CATEGORY UNDERWATER
\nPaul Goldstein | Big Blue\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY UNDERWATER
\nAndrea Pozzi | Trapped\/WINNER CATEGORY NATURAL ART
\nAlessandro Carboni | When the wind blows\/RUNNER-UP CATEGORY NATURAL ART
\nAlessandro Carboni | Sound and Vision\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY NATURAL ART
\nFranka Slothouber | Black walnut\/RUNNER-UP CATEGORY BLACK & WHITE
\nCraig Parry | Contact with the Dwarf Minke\/RUNNER-UP CATEGORY ANIMAL PORTRAITS
\nManuel Enrique Gonz\u00e1lez Carmona | Big Small\/HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY ANIMAL PORTRAITS
\nBart Siebelink | The apocalypse\/WINNER CATEGORY ANIMALS OF \u201cDE LAGE LANDEN\u201d
\nLili Sztreh\u00e1rszki | Tiny details\/WINNER CATEGORY YOUTH 10-17 YEARS<\/p>\n

In addition, I found the following images from the Fred Hazelhoff Portfolio Award winner Alejandro Prieto (Border wall project) to be quite moving: Great Roadrunner and barbed wire, wild jaguar symbolically projected on to a section of the US-Mexico border wall, and photo 8 of ten in the slide show. <\/p>\n

I am sorry that I had to list so many but this is one of the finest collections of natural history images that I have ever had the privilege to look at. And it gets worse: I clicked on the website links for many of the honored photographers and was equally blown away. The good news is that the links to the four previous editions of the contest do not work, at least not on my MacBook Pro. <\/p>\n

Observations<\/h3>\n

There are many talented photographers from around the world. Many of the winning and honored men and women were from Europe. The longest lens that I noted that was used to create a winning or honored image was a 100-400. Many of the winning and honored images were made with fish-eye and wide angle lenses. Along with quite a few 70-200s. Very few of the winning and honored photographers used the latest and greatest gear. Many of the winning and honored images were made in bad weather or underwater. Almost all involved wonderful light and incredible creative vision. In seven of the twelve categories, I chose images other than the Category Winner … <\/p>\n

And Inspired …<\/h3>\n

So I headed out at about 4pm and drove into the park. The first spot I visited did not look very promising with a collection of gulls and terns and shorebirds with wind against sun. I drove around chatting with BPN-friend Brian Sump about photography and about BPN. As the big clouds in the west took over, I headed to my one of my favorite sunset spots just outside the park. Things did not look too promising. When I got off the phone with Brian, I got out the Canon loaner gear, took a short walk, and found a cooperative Great Blue Heron. It was dark and windy. The bird pretty much stood in one spot for an hour. <\/p>\n

Inspired by the NPOTY images to try and create something different, I began working at ridiculously slow shutter speeds, in part to try and blur the slowly moving water, and in part to test the Image Stabilization system on the RF 100-500 and the IBIS (in-body-image stabilization) system of the R5. I got down as slow as 1\/8 second (handheld …) I was quite stunned by the results. I will share my best image from Thursday afternoon here with you tomorrow. <\/p>\n

Typos<\/h3>\n

Feel free to e-mail<\/a><\/center> or to leave a comment regarding any typos or errors. Just be right :). with love, artie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What’s Up? <\/p>\n

Me, early, as usual. It is Friday 18 December 2020. I will be heading to Fort DeSoto at about 6:15am. The forecast looks great: cloudy followed early by sunny skies with northeast winds from 10-13mph. And a rather chilly 43 degrees … It would probably be a good day not to get my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[648],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-648","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70764"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70781,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70764\/revisions\/70781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}