Inspiring and Supporting Photographers of Australian Birds
A Special Interest Group of BirdLife Australia Follow us!
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This Search facility will search all website content, uploaded documents, and images. Some content on this site is restricted to BLP members; visitors may not be able to access all the items found. The search options button on the All Photos page (on the Photo Gallery drop-down menu), and on individual gallery pages, provides more options for searching images only.
The candidate images for the Photo of the Year 2020 award are now available for member voting, you can view them here, Voting is open until 6PM EADT Monday 8th February 2021.
For information on the voting process, please refer to the Competition Voting page - we are using the same voting mechanism for the Photo of the Year voting. Members may vote for up to five images, awarding 5 points to the image you select as best, down to 1 point for your fifth choice; you may choose to award points to fewer than five images. Before voting, you should view all the images in the gallery for the competition to select your choices; you can do this at any time before voting closes, and you do not have to be logged in to the website to view images. You have to be logged in to enter your votes; the Vote section on each image page will only be visible if you are logged in. It will not be visible if the image is yours - you cannot vote for your own image(s).
Our first photo competition for this year is Best of 2020. As the name implies, we invite you to submit your best image(s) taken during 2020.
This competition is open to members for submission of entries until 6pm AEDST Monday 8th March 2021. The normal 2-year time limit for photos does not apply for this competition; images for this competition must have been taken during 2020 (ie. between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2020). Up to four of your best images may be submitted. 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 another existing gallery. See the Photo Gallery - Competitions section for full details and rules of our competitions, and quick access to the current competition galleries. As usual, there are three competition levels: Entry, Intermediate and Advanced. Please refer to the Photo Gallery - Competitions - Competition Levels - Guidelines page for more details. All three levels will be open to member voting at the close of submissions, and a Mystery Reviewer will judge all levels; there may be a delay in publishing these reviews for this competition.
The theme for the third competition this year has been changed from Birds in the Landscape to Birds in their Habitat (excluding waterbirds). Please check the changed requirements for this theme on the 2021 Competition Themes page so that you can accumulate appropriate entry images prior to this competition's commencement on 21 June.
Awards are presented to members who have achieved the top three scores in each competition level. Points are accrued from member votes and Mystery Reviewer judging across the year, for all four competitions. For details, see the About Us - BLP Awards page.
Advanced Level Competition
Gold medal – awarded to Bill Harding
Silver medal – awarded to Jason Moore
Bronze medal – awarded to Stephen Garth
Intermediate Level Competition
Gold medal – awarded to Chris Young
Silver medal – awarded to Linda Unwin
Bronze medal – awarded to Mary Wheeler
Entry Level Competition
Gold medal – awarded to Graham Gall
Silver medal – awarded to Diana Womersley
Bronze medal – awarded to Donna Evans
Congratulations to all our winners!
Our Zoom presentation, Members Inspiring Members, on Wednesday 10th December was attended by 75 members. For those who were unable to attend at the time, we recorded the presentation, and it is now available for members to view, in Resources - Our Video Tutorials -Members Inspiring Members (M). This video is accessible only to our members; you must be logged in to view it. We extend our thanks to the presenters, Glenn Pure, Brian O’Leary, Nathan Watson, Sandy Castle and Con Duyvestyn, who all did a wonderful job of presenting their images and stories.
Our Mystery Reviewers have completed their assessments of the images in each level of the Reflections competition; their ratings are as follows:
Advanced Level – Reflections
Intermediate Level – Reflections
Entry Level – Reflections
The Mystery Reviewer Critiques are available in the Resources - Mystery Reviewer Critiques page. Critiques published within the last two years are only visible to our members; you must be logged in to the site to see them.
Member voting for the Reflections competition, which closed for entries on 2nd November and for voting on 23rd November, has been analysed and the results for the top five images (or more, in the case of a tie) in each category are listed here. This competition received good support from the membership, with 249 images entered across the 3 competition levels by 119 photographers. 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 – Reflections
This category attracted 82 entries, from 27 photographers. 44 members voted, with the following result:
Intermediate Level – Reflections
This category attracted 103 entries, from 37 photographers. 49 members voted, with the following result:
Entry Level – Reflections
This category attracted 64 entries, from 24 photographers. 46 members voted, with the following result:
Congratulations to all these photographers for their quality images.
Results of the 2020 BirdLife Australia Photography Awards have been released on the official competition site.
The competition received 6,500 entries this year, a big increase on the 4,100 in 2019, with lots of great photography on display including work
by a number of BLP members. Special congratulations to our members who participated in this competition.
Our 2020 Members Survey showed that over 90% of responders would like us to develop a resource on our website for members to post information about recent field trips for the benefit of other members. We have set up a page for this purpose, at Resources - Road Trip Reports; committee member Doug Castle has provided a couple of articles to get the ball rolling. These reports are member-only access for two years; you must be logged in to see them.
If you would like to contribute to this resource, please send your report(s) to our website administrator, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Don't worry about formatting; you can even send the report as an email message. You can include a couple of photos if you wish.
BirdLife Photography members are once again well represented in this year's results for two prestigous international competitions.
Georgina Steytler won the Best Portfolio Award in the Bird Photographer of the Year 2020 competition. Those who follow her on Instagram will have seen a number of photos she's taken recently with her new Olympus mirrorless camera. Glenn Pure also did well in this competition, with two Commended images in the Best Portrait category and one in the Bird Behaviour category.
Seven members were in the shortlisted finalists of the Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year competition. They were Kim Wormald and Gary Meredith in the Animal Behaviour category, Keith Lightbody and Claire Greenwell in the Threatened Species category, Lea Scaddan and David Stowe in the Animal Portrait category, and Elizabeth Oxnam in the Botanical category,
Congratulations to all these photographers for their excellent work - well done!
Our 2021 Photo Competitions for BirdLife Photography members will have the following themes:
Note: the theme for the third competition has changed from that originaly published ("Birds in the Landscape").
Except for the Best of 2020 competition, all entries must have been taken within three years of the opening date of the competition; this is a change to our standard competition rules. The competition dates are now available, on the 2021 Competition Themes page.
The easiest way to contact us is by emailing us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Our People page, in the About Us section, contains email links to each of the committee members.
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