{"id":5440,"date":"2020-01-09T12:21:32","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T12:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/?p=5440"},"modified":"2020-01-10T12:04:29","modified_gmt":"2020-01-10T12:04:29","slug":"2019-competition-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/09\/2019-competition-winners\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 Competition Winners"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nature Picture Library’s photographers were successful in many of the major photography competions last year. Here is our round-up of the 2019 Competition Winners and the highly commended images. We’ve also created a new 2019 winners gallery<\/a> featuring all the winning and commended images.<\/p>\n

Wildlife Photographer of the Year<\/h2>\n

Ingo Arndt was joint winner of the Mammal Behaviour category and Stefan Christmann won the portfolio section with his lovely set of emperor penguin images.\u00a0 The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition<\/a> has now been running for more than 40 years and the awards ceremony at the Natural History Museum in London is always a highlight of the nature photography calendar.<\/p>\n\"\"<\/a>\n

Ingo told us the story behind his amazing image of a puma attacking a guanaco<\/h3>\n

“I spent seven months in the Torres del Paine region of Patagonia. My goal was to photograph the first story of wild pumas, from behind the lens – not just using camera traps. Every day I followed the pumas and after month some of them got used to my presence. I was able to observe behaviour that was never documented before, because the pumas trusted me. The “key picture\u201c of the story was a puma hunting a guanaco, their main prey in many areas of Patagonia.”<\/p>\n

“It was five months before I had the perfect situation, when a female puma tried to pull down a full grown male guanaco. The guanaco was huge but the puma tried to kill it anyway. The cat was close to killing the guanaco and already hanging onto his neck. But the very experienced guanaco was bumping with all his weight against the puma, his last chance, and the cat lost contact. Finally the guanaco survived, but I had all I wanted, a unique image of the puma in contact with the huge guanaco. The light was perfect, the background clear\u2026 you get such a situation just once in your life, a dream for every wildlife photographer!”<\/p>\n

And Stefan reveals his unique experience with the emperor penguins of Antarctica<\/h3>\n

Stefan spent a year in Antarctica, working on the BBC Dynasties series, and had a rare opportunity to witness and photograph one of nature’s great survival stories – the winter breeding of emperor penguins, surviving driving blizzards and temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees. In Stefan’s words: \u201cWhen I first picked up a camera as a student, the quality of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year was what I always aspired to. Now, almost 20 years later, I finally have proof that anyone can become a part of this amazing competition by pouring their heart and soul into something they really care about. I hope it will inspire other young photographers to embark on their own personal journeys and never ever give up!\u201d<\/p>\n