The winners of the Veolia Environment Photographer of the Year Competition, owned by the Natural History Museum in London and BBC Worldwide, were announced this week.
The competition, now in its 48th year, features powerful images of nature (and sometimes its destruction), including a moonset at sunrise, a polar bear stranded on an ice floe and endangered Bengal tigers.
One-hundred winning photographs were culled from 48,000 entries from 98 countries.
Here are some of the stories behind the award-winning images. You can see more photographs at the Natural History Museum website.
"Into the mouth of the caiman" by Luciano Candisani from Brazil
Motionless but alert, a yacare caiman waits, ‘like a small tyrannosaurus’ for fish to come within snapping reach, says Luciano.
Caimans are usually seen floating passively on the surface. Under the water, it’s another story. It’s this secret life that has fascinated Luciano ever since he first came face to face with a caiman while snorkelling. Once he’d recovered from the shock, he realised that the reptile was neither aggressive nor fearful – and that he could approach it. Luciano now regularly documents the underwater life of caimans in the shallow, murky waters of Brazil’s Pantanal (the biggest wetland in the world), which contains the largest single crocodilian population on Earth.
Caimans can grow to be three metres in length. Most aren’t aggressive, but some individuals can be. ‘The safest way to get close is when they are concentrating on a shoal of fish,’ says Luciano. ‘While I was concentrating on this caiman emerging from the gloom, I had a field biologist with me all the time.’ The result was ‘the picture that’s been in my imagination since my father first showed me a caiman 25 years ago.’
Luciano Candisani /Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012
"Dog days" by Kim Wolhuter of South Africa.
Kim has been filming African wild dogs at Zimbabwe’s Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve for more than four years. He knows one pack intimately. ‘I have travelled with them, on foot, in the pack itself, running with them as they hunt. It’s a privilege, and it’s given me a true insight into their life.’
Kim has also witnessed first hand the many threats that have made African wild dogs endangered, including increased conflict with humans and domestic animals (poachers’ snares, habitat loss, traffic and disease). ‘At times, it’s heart- wrenching,’ he says. ‘My mission is to dispel the myth that they’re a threat and help raise awareness of their plight.’
African wild dogs require huge territories, and so protecting them can protect entire ecosystems. When this picture was taken, the pack had travelled four kilometres to the Sosigi Pan, only to find it totally dried up. ‘The mosaic of mud seemed to epitomise the increasingly fragmented world this puppy is growing up in.’
Kim Wolhuter/Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012
"The eye of the baitball" by Cristóbal Serrano of Spain
Cristóbal found this great circling shoal of grunt fish in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, and watched it over two days. He would dive down and then sit on the sandy bottom some 20 metres below the surface to watch.
‘With the sky behind the fish ball,’ he says, ‘it looked like a shimmering body of energy. I just needed a focal point to get the picture I was after.’ A pelagic cormorant was also watching the fish, and now and then it would shoot a hole through the ever-tightening baitball (tightening in response to the predator), making it easier for it to pick off individual fish.
Cristóbal tried to predict the angle that the cormorant would use. After many attempts, using a fisheye lens and strobes to illuminate the fish and the sandy bottom, he got the shot.
Cristóbal Serrano/Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012
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