Reminder: member voting for our first competition for this year, Best of 2018, will close on Monday, 25^th March 2019.  As usual, you may vote for one or more of the competition levels; you do not need to have submitted an image to the competition to vote.

If you need help on how to vote, see the Photo Galleries-Competitions-Competition Voting page.

Please remember that this is not a popularity vote for your favourite bird, the rarest species or the most colourful bird.  Your scoring (5 points for the best image, down to 1 point for your fifth choice) should reflect the following:

• Does the image meet the theme criteria?
• Does the image meet the key criteria for a quality image? (see 'Competition Voting' for more details).

In addition to the membership vote, each competition level is reviewed by an experienced/professional judge - our "Mystery Reviewer" - and those scores are added to the members' voting results for the end-of-year medal awards.

We have been trialling a larger image size in the Advanced level of this competition; entries for that level were required to be either 1800 pixels wide or 1800 pixels high.  This has some implications for viewing the images.  Our website uses what is known as "responsive design", and will scale images which are wider than your browser window to fit on-screen. This means that if your browser window is not wider than about 1850 pixels (allowing for page margins and scroll-bar), you will not see a full-size image which is 1800 pixels wide; it will be scaled to fit your page width. The screen/browser resolution data that we have available indicates that about 2/3 of our members are using screens with HD (1920 x 1080) or higher resolution, and will be able to see 1800 pixel wide images with no scaling.

If your browser window is wide enough to display the image at full size, there will be no scaling; this means that an image which is 1800 pixels high will need a browser window about 1950 pixels high to see the whole image which is 1800 pixels high (allowing for browser title/menu/address bars and task bar at bottom of screen). Very few of our members have screens with such high resolution; to see the whole of an 1800-high image they will need to reduce their browser window width - yes, it sounds counter-intuitive - to cause the image to be scaled until its height is reduced sufficiently to display in the browser window. For example, there is an image in the Advanced competition which is 1350 wide x 1800 high; on my desktop monitor (1680 x 1050 resolution), with a maximized browser window, I can see the image at full size, but I only see about half of the image height; I need to reduce my browser window width to about 750 pixels to see the complete image, which at that point has been scaled to about 50% of its full size. I would do this if I was assessing images for voting, so that I could see the overall composition; I would also view it full size to see image detail.  Changing the browser window width will allow people with screens which cannot display an 1800 x 1800 image at full size to get the "best of both worlds" with the large image format.

Best Photograph of the Year - Interchangeable Lens Camera

Regent Bowerbirds - Brian O'Leary (Image ID 30762)

Best Photograph of the Year - Fixed Lens Camera

Australian Pelican - Rodger Scott (Image ID 31133)

The winners of these Photographs of the Year will receive a BLP gold medal.

The other short-list finalists for Photo of the Year were:

Interchangeable Lens Camera:

• Southern Boobook, by Warren Wilson (Image ID 30598)
• Masked Woodswallow, by Jill Wilson (Image ID 29151)
• Australasian Gannet, by Con Duyvestyn (Image ID 31712)
• Azure Kingfisher, by Bill Harding (Image ID 33038)

Fixed Lens Camera:

• Golden-headed Cisticola, by Rodger Scott (Image ID 31313)
• Little Corella, by Anne Burgess (Image ID 30329)
• Blue-faced Honeyeater, by Malcolm Bone (Image ID 29786)
• Great Knot, by Anne Burgess (Image ID 29670)

World renowned bird photographer Glenn Bartley will be the keynote speaker at the Birdlife Photography Biennial Conference on 21st & 22nd September 2019, in Fremantle, WA.

Save those dates!

There's only a few days left to get your entries in for this competition!

Our first photo competition for this year is Best of 2018.  As the name implies, we invite you to submit your best image(s) taken during 2018.

This competition is open to members for submission of entries until Monday 25^th February 2019.  The normal 2-year time limit for photos does not apply for this competition; images for this competition must have been taken during 2018 (ie. between 1^st January 2018 and 31^st December 2018).  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.

For this competition, we are trialing a larger image size for the Advanced level.  In that category, images may be up to 1800px wide and 1800px high; at least one of the image dimensions must be 1800px.  The image filesize limit has also been increased, to 2560kB.

The BirdLife Photography Annual Award for 2018 - our most prestigious award - goes to Tim Van Leeuwen.  This award is made to the member who excels against the following criteria:

• submits at least 24 high quality images to the image galleries on the website during the calendar year,
• participates in at least 50% of the Current Competitions organised during the calendar year,
• actively contributes to at least one of a range of BirdLife Photography activities, events, project or resources that benefit our members.

Tim’s contributions, against these criteria, were as follows:

• Submitted over 100 images to non-competition galleries. 17 of these appeared in the “Recent Picks” sidebar.
• Entered every competition during 2018, winning the Member’s Voting and Mystery Reviewer's award in one of these competitions for the year; many other competition entries received commended results.
• Established our social media sites on Instagram and Facebook, and continues to manage those sites.

Tim’s contribution to BirdLife Photography throughout 2018 was truly outstanding, and we thank him for his efforts.  Congratulations Tim!

The award is presented as a multi-faceted crystal, with a frosted white-on-crystal BLP logo and laser inscription, in a velvet presentation case.