The Outdoor Photographer of the Year Competition

 

At the Water’s Edge: Witold Ziomek (Poland) – Thórsmörk (the valley of Thor), Iceland.

After a morning full of drama, during which we almost ‘drowned’ our car in a river – and then pulled out a young Frenchman who had lost his – we reached Thórsmörk, in the south of Iceland. We walked up to a viewpoint where we could see … exactly nothing, due to the fog. We waited, and eventually the fog started to lift, but I still needed to wait a lot longer for a car to appear in the perfect position to add a sense of scale to the mountain landscape.

A View from Above: Tom Sweetman (UK) – Chiang Mai, Thailand.

It was just before sunset in Chiang Mai and I decided to ride my scooter alongside the famous Ping river. As I was approaching a bridge I stopped to take a break and noticed that it was a motorbike bridge for locals, connecting two villages. I took this aerial photograph with my drone to document the incredible patterns in the river and the locals crossing the bridge on their scooters. Some days you just capture the moment.

Under Exposed: Pekka Tuuri (Finland) – Great white shark, Isla Guadalupe, Mexico.

Isla Guadalupe is the world capital when it comes to observing great white sharks, but cage diving seriously limits the possibilities to take ‘fresh’ pictures. When I took this, the water close to the surface was quite milky, making photography very challenging. From out of the ‘mist’, I saw this great white shark lurking behind a school of fusiliers. I quickly focused on the shark and set a wide aperture to get focus blur on the fish, along with a fast shutter to avoid excessive motion blur.

Small World: Amy Bateman (UK) – Kendal, Cumbria, England.

This frogspawn had been spawned in a puddle that was drying up on our farm in Cumbria. We rescued it as a way to teach my children about wildlife conservation and ecology, keeping it on our patio in a fish tank. I photographed it regularly throughout its growth to show the incredible rapid morphological development. We released the fully grown froglets back to a site close to their spawn site.