Photo Competition Awards

BirdLife Photography is excited to announce the medal winners for our Photo Competitions held in 2025.  Our competition Coordinator, Doug Castle, says:

The competitions were well supported this year and the varied topics tested the photographers. The Best of 2025 is perhaps the easiest of the competitions as there is no restriction on the subject matter or style. This was followed by a much more difficult competition, Going Cuckoo. The entries for this competition were down, reflecting the difficulty in obtaining images. It suited those who spend a lot of time in the field. Small in the frame challenged the photographer to think more about composition and the environment. We completed the year with Aggression and Affection as the topic and this produced some very interesting images.

Congratulations to all who participated in the competitions and I hope that you learnt from the experience. It is nice to win but the real goal is to continue improving on your photographic journey.

Advanced Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Ben Harvey
   Silver medal – awarded to Chinh Nguyen
   Bronze medal – awarded to Nathan Watson

Intermediate Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Beverly Oliver
   Gold medal – awarded to Alan Bennett
   Silver medal – awarded to Tony Willis
   Silver medal – awarded to Doug Wilson
   Bronze medal – awarded to Maggie Roberts-Duffy

Entry Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Louie Owen
   Silver medal – awarded to Judy Willis
   Bronze medal – awarded to William J Owen

BirdLife Photography is excited to announce the medal winners for our Photo Competitions held in 2024.  Our competition Coordinator, Doug Castle, says:

The 2024 competitions were of two types; non-specific images and species-specific images.  The non-specific image competitions Best of 2023 and Monochrome attracted 102 and 107 photographers respectively.  The species-specific competitions Small and Fast (Thornbills and Gerygones) and Honeyeaters attracted 73 and 78 photographers.  The variation in numbers of photographers in these two types of competition could be due to a lack of good cataloguing of images.  Unless you have a good searchable system, it would be onerous looking for suitable images to enter into the competition.  I recommend that you use Lightroom for cataloguing and download the keyword list that is on our website. You can find it at Resources > Libraries & Documents: open General Information, then open the BWL-V3 - Lightroom Keywords file.  Eventually you could expand this list to subspecies level.

Advanced Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Nathan Watson
   Silver medal – awarded to John Eley
   Bronze medal – awarded to Sandy Castle
   Bronze medal – awarded to Mary Wheeler

Intermediate Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Ben Harvey
   Silver medal – awarded to Yolande Cozijn
   Bronze medal – awarded to Cheryl Ponter
   Bronze medal – awarded to Maggie Roberts-Duffy

Entry Level Competition

   Gold medal – awarded to Lisa Brophy
   Silver medal – awarded to William J Owen
   Silver medal – awarded to Julie Mills
   Bronze medal – awarded to Robin Spry

BirdLife Photography is excited to announce the medal winners for our Photo Competitions held in 2023.  Our competition Coordinator, Doug Castle, says:

We all want to improve as bird photographers and being challenged to enter competitions is a step in self-improvement.  It takes a certain degree of courage to put forward your images to be judged by your peers.  Those who do so enjoy the experience and benefit from it.

Advanced Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Jason Moore
   Silver medal  – awarded to Stephen Garth
   Bronze medal  – awarded to Nathan Watson

Intermediate Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Chinh Nguyen
   Silver medal  – awarded to Fran Solly
   Bronze medal – awarded to Cheryl Ponter

Entry Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Ben Harvey
   Silver medal  – awarded to Yolande Cozijn
   Bronze medal – awarded to Julie Mills
   Bronze medal – awarded to Rainie Zhang

Encouragement Awards

The BirdLife Photography Encouragement award is awarded to a member who shows a high level of improvement in the quality of photos submitted during the year in the Entry or the Intermediate level.

The committee and competition coordinator would like to congratulate our recipients of the award for 2023, Hugh Crisp and Judy Willis.

BirdLife Photography is excited to announce the medal winners for our Photo Competitions held in 2022.  Our competition Coordinator, Gary King, says:

Advanced Level was very close with 8 members within 5 points of the Gold Medal for the year. This bodes well for another exciting competition next year between our Advanced Level photographers.  It is proposed that all the medal winners at Entry Level and Intermediate Level compete at higher levels in 2023.  I would like to remind members that in the point-scoring, entrants receive one point for each competition they enter. This can make a difference if points are close towards the end of the year.  Members should be wary of submitting two very similar images of the same species in the same competition. I made this mistake in the final competition this year with one image scoring 40 points and the other 15 points; if I had only submitted one image it is likely that most of the points would have gone to that image.  Finally, I cannot emphasise enough the value of spending time in the field if you wish to improve your bird photography. Our Entry Level Gold Medallist for 2022, Amy Rakkusol, has only been photographing birds for a little over two years.  Amy spends a lot of time in the field and her photographic development and results speak for themselves.

Advanced Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Mary Wheeler
   Silver medal  – awarded to Jason Moore
   Bronze medal  – awarded to Con Duyvestyn
   Bronze medal  – awarded to Peter Scholer

 Intermediate Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Natalie Murray
   Silver medal  – awarded to Diana Womersley
   Bronze medal – awarded to Jacob Crisp

Entry Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Amy Rakkusol
   Silver medal  – awarded to Indrani Pathirage
   Bronze medal – awarded to Beverley Oliver
   Bronze medal – awarded to Astrid Ross

Encouragement Awards

The BirdLife Photography Encouragement award is awarded to a member who shows a high level of improvement in the quality of photos submitted during the year in the Entry or the Intermediate level.

The committee and competition coordinator would like to congratulate our recipients of the award for 2022, Fran Solly and Sandra Lewis.

BirdLife Photography is excited to announce the medal winners for our Photo Competitions held in 2021.  Our competition Coordinator, Gary King, says:

Congratulations to all our medal winners for 2021 and a big thank you to all our members who entered the competitions. At all levels it was necessary to produce a high quality image to win a competition. Overall the standard of entries continues to improve and I am sure that this in part due to the competitions making us think more about what makes a good image. I hope you all are now starting to look for suitable entries for next year’s competitions.

Advanced Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Jason Moore
   Silver medal  – awarded to Steve Mantle
   Bronze medal  – awarded to Nathan Watson

Intermediate Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Jane Putland
   Silver medal  – awarded to John Eley
   Bronze medal – awarded to Graham Gall

Entry Level Competition

   Gold medal  – awarded to Sylvia Wallis
   Silver medal  – awarded to Linda Waters
   Bronze medal – awarded to Chunfang Liu

Up and Coming Photographers

The Up & Coming Photographer certificates are awarded to members who show promise, improvement and consistency during a calendar year. They are given to the photographers who finish just outside the annual medal winners in our annual competitions at Intermediate and Entry Level.

For 2021 both recipients finished only one point behind the bronze medallists. Congratulations to Up & Coming Photographers certificate winners Michiko Iida (Intermediate Level) and Robyn Elliott (Entry Level). Both Michiko and Robyn have been invited to compete at the next higher level in the 2022 competitions.

Robyn was very positive about going up a level and already has submitted entries in the current competition.

Michiko is excited about the prospect of going up a level and is considering if she is ready for the challenge of competing at the Advanced level.

Both Michiko and Robyn will be presented with certificates featuring one of their own images.