Member voting for the Introduced Species competition, which closed for entries on 12^th August and for voting on 8^th September, has been analysed and the results for the top five images in each category are listed here.  The Winner is the image which received the most votes; and we also show the next four highest placed images, rating them as Highly Commended if they received at least 90% of the votes for the winning image, and Commended for scores less than that.

Advanced Level – Introduced Species

This category attracted 38 entries, from 14 photographers. 27 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - House Sparrow, by Bill Harding (Image ID 35781)
• Commended - Common Starling, by Stephen Garth (Image ID 35990)
• Commended - Helmeted Guineafowl, by Tim Van Leeuwen (Image ID 36016)
• Commended - Common Myna, by Terence Alexander (Image ID 36269)
• Commended - Spotted Dove, by Sandy Castle (Image ID 36151)

Intermediate Level – Introduced Species

This category attracted 39 entries, from 17 photographers. 29 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - Ostrich, by Gary King (Image ID 36037)
• Commended - Laughing Dove, by Cherilyn Corker (Image ID 35936)
• Commended - House Sparrow, by John Eley (Image ID 36026)
• Commended - Eurasian Tree Sparrow, by Con Duyvestyn (Image ID 36227)
• Commended - Common Starling, by Michiko Iida (Image ID 36260)

Entry Level – Introduced Species

This category attracted 18 entries, from 6 photographers. 31 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - Spotted Dove, by Jennifer Carr (Image ID 35925)
• Commended - House Sparrow, by Graham Gall (Image ID 35931)
• Commended - Common Blackbird, by Jennifer Carr (Image ID 36200)
• Commended - Common Myna, by Mary Wheeler (Image ID 36103)
• Commended - Rock Dove, by Graham Gall (Image ID 35906)

Congratulations to all these photographers for their qulity images

The theme for our last competition for 2019 is Pairs.    Entries must show a pair of birds, male and female, of the same species.   For those species which cannot be clearly identified as male/female on the basis of plumage, we will accept images of pairs where the behaviour observed when photographed indicates that they are a male/female pair.  Please remember that all competition entries must have relevant comments, including why you have chosen the image for the competition.

This competition is open to members for submission of entries until Monday 4^th November 2019.  Images for this competition must have been taken within the last 2 years.  Images submitted to previous competitions, or to the New Images gallery, may be submitted to this competition; if you choose to do this, you must resubmit the image to the competition gallery; images cannot be moved from an existing gallery.  We are also continuing to accept larger size images for the Advanced competition; images in that category may be up to 1800px wide and 1800px high, and must have at least one dimension meeting that maximum size.

We have been overwhelmed with the number and standard of entries in our national competition.  At close of entries late on Sunday 4^th August, we'd received more than 4,100 entries, eclipsing the 3,100 received in 2018 (the competition's first year).

Our panel of top international and Australian judges have a big task ahead of them.  We're expecting to announce results in late October or early November.

We thank all entrants for supporting the competition, especially our own Birdlife Photography members.

Over the years, we've published a number of educational/tutorial articles in our bi-monthly Newsletter.  These are now available in Resources - Our Articles.  That page provides access to articles in four categories:

• Photography Techniques and Processes
• Image Processing
• Articles about Equipment
• In-depth Technical Articles

Articles in this section which are less than 24 months old are only accessible to our members, who must log-in to access them.

In the past week or so (early April), we've had several members contact us to report that they have been unable to upload images to our galleries; the upload would hang, sometimes reporting a timeout error, sometimes with no error message.  It appears that a recent update to the Safari web browser - the default for Apple systems - is the cause of this behaviour.  Our advice to Safari users who experience this problem is to change to an alternative web browser; we recommend either Chrome or Firefox.