This is the 50th anniversary of the London Natural History Museum’s “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” contest. Many venues have shown some of the winning images (drawn from 42,000 submissions coming from 96 countries), but the captions and explanations of the photos are best seen at the Torygraph.  The winner for Wildlife Photographer of the Year was Michael Nichols, and, surprisingly, his winning photo was in black and white (I’d like to see it in color as well). It’s below, along with all the Torygraph’s captions (indented). Unsurprisingly, Nichols’s photo features felids.

First, though, the BBC News site describes the photo:

Michael “Nick” Nichols tracked the pride of big cats for six months before capturing this stunning shot, which stretches all the way to the horizon and includes a dramatic African sky.

. . . Judge Magdalena Herrera is director of photography at GEO France, as well as being a veteran of National Geographic France.

She said American Nichols’ composition had all the elements of a perfect picture.

“It tells you about behaviour, about the photographic techniques today, and it shows you the relationship of the animal to its environment,” she told BBC News.

“What is striking about Nick’s picture is its narrative – it’s not just a portrait; there’s a whole story going on inside it. And the black and white gives it a feeling of reportage.”

This story is of the females of the Vumbi pride in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.

They are sleeping with their cubs in the late-afternoon sunshine, having just fought and driven off a couple of over inquisitive males. [JAC: remember that new males who invade a pride often kill the resident cubs so they can replace them with their own kin.]

Nichols caught the scene, which he calls The Last Great Picture, from on top of his vehicle.

He said the infrared transformed the light, turning “the moment into something primal, biblical almost”.

Three of the females were killed a few months later when the pride ventured on to land beyond the park.

And, without further ado, a selection of my favorites and the complete captions from the Torygraph (there are more at photos at its site; I’ve chosen just a few):

The winners in the 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have been announced, with this photograph of lazing lions beating more than 42,000 entries from 96 countries to the top award.

American photographer Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols was named Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2014 by a panel of international judges for his serene black-and-white image of lions resting with their cubs in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park.

Nichols followed the pride for nearly six months and they became used to his presence. This shot was taken in infra-red, which he explains, ‘transforms the light and turns the moment into something primal, biblical almost’.

The last great picture

Winner ‘Black and White’ and overall ‘Wildlife Photographer of the Year’

Hearing that masses of common frogs were gathering in a flooded gravel pit near his home in Västerbotten, Sweden, Anton Lilja set out to photograph the mating spectacle. Lying down on the bank at eye level with the water, he became fascinated by the light bouncing off the spawn and the water, which by now was vibrating with the activity of the frogs.

Experimenting with his flash, he achieved the effect he wanted just as a pair of frogs in amplexus popped up right in front of the camera, the male revealing his throat to be flushed with blue. They stayed posed amid the glossy wobbliness, allowing Anton time to compose his shot.

The long embrace

Winner ’15 to 17 Years’

Cheese and sausage are what Siberian jays like – so Edwin Sahlin discovered on a skiing holiday with his family in northern Sweden. Whenever they stopped for lunch, he would photograph the birds that gathered in hope of scraps.

On this occasion, while his family ate their sandwiches, Edwin dug a pit in the snow deep enough to climb into. He scattered titbits of food around the edge and then waited. To his delight, the jays flew right over him, allowing him to photograph them from below and capture the full rusty colours of their undersides more clearly than he had dared hope.

Snowbird

Finalist ’15 to 17 Years’

Planktonic animals are usually photographed under controlled situations, after they’ve been caught, but Fabien Michenet is fascinated by the beauty of their living forms.

Night-diving in deep water off the coast of Tahiti, he became fascinated by this juvenile sharpear enope squid. Just 3cm long, it was floating motionless about 20 metres below the surface.

Its transparent body was covered with polka dots of pigment-filled cells, and below its eyes were bioluminescent organs. Knowing it would be sensitive to light and movement, Fabien gradually manoeuvred in front of it, trying to hang as motionless as his subject. Using as little light as possible to get the autofocus working, he finally triggered the strobes and took the squid’s portrait before it disappeared into the deep.

Little squid

Finalist ‘Underwater Species’

A focus of Jan van der Greef‘s trip to Ecuador was the astonishing sword-billed hummingbird – the only bird with a bill longer than its body (excluding its tail). Its 11cm bill is designed to reach nectar at the base of equally long tube-shaped flowers, but Jan discovered that it can have another use.

One particular bird had a regular circuit through the forest, mapped out by its favourite red angel trumpet flowers and bird-feeders near Jan’s lodge. To get to the bird-feeders, it had to cross the territory of a fiercely territorial collared inca. Rather than being scared off, once or twice a day ‘it used its bill to make a statement’. To capture one of these stand-offs, Jan set up multiple flashes to freeze the hummingbirds’ wing-beats – more than 60 a second – and finally captured the precise colourful moment.

Touché

Finalist ‘Birds’

Picture: Jan van der Greef

I saw a stuffed specimen of the sword-bill when I visited the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia a few years ago. It was amazing—the bill really is longer than the whole bird!

Here are two more from the BBC’s site:

Chile’s Francisco Negroni won the Earth’s Environments prize for capturing the lightning show around an eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano complex.

Alex Badyaev from the US [an evolutionary ecologist] took the Mammals category for this shot of a deer mouse standing on a mushroom in western Montana :

h/t: pyers~