Winning and shorlisted entries in the 2019 Birdlife Australia Photography Awards have been announced, and are available on the competition website.  Quite a few BLP members' entries were among the shortlisted and winning entries, highlighting the great talent we have in our group. Congratulations to all!

The competition was even bigger than 2018, with about 4,100 entries received.  The BLP committee has agreed to donate $4,000 from the competition funds to Birdlife Australia's Regent Honeyeater program, in support of 2019's special theme of Honeyeaters.

A big thank you to all members who supported the competition, and look out for an even better competition in 2020.  The special theme for 2020, Fairy-wrens, Emu-wrens and Grasswrens, has already been announced so you can get to the task of getting some suitable entries.

Our 2020 Photo Competitions for BirdLife Photography members will have the following themes:

1. Best of 2019.  Up to four of your best bird shots taken during 2019.
2. Finches and Chats.  Finches include all the birds within the family Weaver Finches (Estrildidae), detailed in the BWL taxonomy currently used on this website, plus the European Goldfinch and the European Greenfinch. Chats include the four species of Chat plus the Gibberbird.
3. Head and Bill Portrait.  The focus is on the head and bill but an appropriate amount of neck and upper body (minimum please) as a base for the head and bill is acceptable.  The challenge is to obtain sharpness and clarity with the identifiable features of the head and bill including those features that identify the species.
4. Reflections.  The reflection must be of the bird and will mainly be in water but could be in other reflective surfaces such as mirrors (eg. external mirrors on cars).  While many of the entries will be water-birds keep in mind that bush-birds go to water to drink early in the morning when the water is often still and ideal for reflection.  We have a number of such images in the BLP library ranging from cockatoos and parrots to small birds such as finches. The reflection must be recognisable as the bird that is the subject of the photograph.

Except for the Best of 2019 competition, all entries must have been taken within two years of the opening date of the competition.  The competition dates are now available, on the 2020 Competition Themes page.

Our October Newsletter contained an announcement of the Special Theme for the 2020 BirdLife Australia Photography Award competition, which is Australian Fairy-wrens, Emu-wrens and Grasswrens.  This much-loved Australasian bird family, the fairy-wrens, emu-wrens and grasswrens come in a wide range of stunning plumages. They are characterised by long legs, tiny bodies and long straight tails, and are always found in family groups. Many fairy-wrens are much loved features of our parks and gardens, while others, such as the endangered grasswrensand the elusive emu-wrens require special trips to see them and a lot of searching!  Images must contain one or more fairy-wren, emu-wren or grasswren species which are defined as all species in the family Maluridae.

BirdLife Photography is delighted to announce the winner of the 2017 Tom Oliver Award  ...

Con Boekel

Our 2017 TOA winner, Georgina Steytler, presented the 2019 Award Certificate to Con during our Biennial Conference in Fremantle.

Tom Oliver Award Winners, Georgina Steytler (2017) and Con Boekel (2019)

Con's winning entry, a photo essay titled "Bird Photography for What?", is available here.

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.