A selection of shortlisted photos from the Australian Bird Photographer of the Year competition has opened on The Guardian Australia website for a people's choice vote.  Visit here to cast your vote - you only get one!

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.

More than 3,100 photos were entered in this year's inaugural Australian Bird Photographer of the Year contest, showcasing Australian birds at their most brilliant, vulnerable, astounding and beautiful.  We are proud to announce the 2018 winners across 7 categories.

• Bird Behaviour winner — ‘Slight Disagreement’ by Shelley Pearson
• Bird Portrait winner — ‘A Family Affair’ by Gary Meredith
• Human Impact winner — ‘A Tragic End’ by Danny McCreadie
• Special Theme: Black-Cockatoos winner — ‘Shadow Dancer’ by Lachlan Hall
• Birds in the Landscape winner — ‘Brolgas Flee Fire’ by Cathryn Vasseleu
• Creative/Fine Art winner — ‘Swooping’ by Sar Nop
• Youth winner — ‘Crested Pigeon’ by Campbell Mole

To view the winning and shortlisted entries, please visit the competition website: www.birdlifephotoaward.org.au/gallery-home

Prizes

Our seven winning photographers will share in $6,500 in cash awards thanks to our sponsors — Leica, NT Tourism Birding Trails, the Lake Cowal Foundation and BirdLife Photography.  The winning images will be featured in the December 2018 Australian Birdlife magazine.

Of the 120 winning and shortlisted images showcased on the Australian Bird Photographer of the Year website, 30 images will be chosen and featured in The Guardian online website in a Christmas People’s Choice Awards.

Twelve images from those shortlisted will feature in the BirdLife Australia 2019 calendar and greeting card series

Funds for Conservation

The 2018 Australian Bird Photographer of the Year Award featured a special theme — Black-cockatoos — and we are proud to announce, after the overwhelming success of this year’s award, we will be handing over $2,000 to ‘Kids helping Cockies’, a project established in 2012 with the aim of educating and engaging local schools in habitat propagation and restoration activities for the endangered South-eastern Red-tailed Black-Cockatoo.

Member voting for the Birds in Arid Habitats competition, which closed for entries on 8^th October and for voting on 29^th October, has been analysed and the results for the top 5 images in each category are listed here.  In line with many other bird/wildlife photo competitions, we present the results in the following manner: 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 – Birds in Arid Habitats

This category attracted 39 entries, from 12 photographers. 37 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - Red-backed Kingfisher, by Glenn Pure (Image ID 31911)
• Commended - Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, by Terence Alexander (Image ID 32169)
• Commended - Mulga Parrot, by Brian O'Leary (Image ID 31888)
• Commended - Spiny-cheeked Honeyeater, by Wilson Lennard (Image ID 31930)
• Commended - Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, by Chris Morecroft (Image ID 32050)

Intermediate Level – Birds in Arid Habitats

This category attracted 70 entries, from 22 photographers. 35 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, by Peter Owen (Image ID 32012)
• Commended - Mulga Parrot, by Bill Harding (Image ID 31989)
• Commended - Australian Ringneck, by Michiko Iida (Image ID 31926)
• Commended - Spinifex Pigeon, by Gary King (Image ID 31831)
• Commended - Major Mitchell's Cockatoo, by Hayley Alexander (Image ID 32143)

Entry Level – Birds in Arid Habitats

This category attracted 19 entries, from 5 photographers. 40 members voted, with the following result:

• Winner - Spinifex Pigeon, by Chris Young (Image ID 32005)
• Highly Commended - Yellow Chat, by Chris Young (Image ID 32022)
• Commended - Black-faced Woodswallow, by Chris Young (Image ID 32068)
• Commended - Mistletoebird, by Jennifer Carr (Image ID 32155)
• Commended - Brown Falcon, by Deanne Gaskill (Image ID 32187)

Congratulations to all these photographers for their quality images

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.